Am I your problem, Kemi Badenoch?

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Kemi Badenoch has made clear that she thinks that university-educated people who might challenge what she wants to do to this country are high on her list of the enemies of society. I, on the other hand, work at a university, seeking to produce the people who might hold her to account. Does that make me Kemi Badenoch's problem?

This is the audio version:

This is the transcript:


Am I your problem, Kemi Badenoch? I asked the question for a very good reason, because Kemi Badenoch published a pamphlet during the course of her Conservative Party leadership campaign. It was entitled, ‘Conservatism in Crisis, The Rise of the Bureaucratic Class', and in it she attacked UK society.

Some are those who have mental health issues. They, apparently, are a massive burden to society, and I'm going to discuss that in another video soon.

But another group that she took great issue with are those who work in universities, and I do. And those who've got degrees. And I have. In fact, almost half the young people in the UK now have degrees, and Kemi Badenoch really does not like that fact.

Her diatribe, because I can't really describe this document in any other way, is based upon prejudice. There is no doubt about that; it's very clear from everything that drips from it. But why does she hate those who are educated so much? Well, it's clear that the answer comes from her analysis of electoral results in the USA.

Her claim is that those who had degrees voted for Biden in 2020 and those who hadn't voted for Trump and, therefore, having a degree is very obviously a bad thing to possess.

It makes you left-wing, she claims, and that is disastrous because the left wing is the enemy in her very weird worldview.

And it makes you a proponent of bureaucracy, that system of government that she wishes to control by becoming leader of the opposition and so prospective prime minister, but which she apparently hates.

I deliberately used the tone that I did because there is an obvious paradox in everything that she's saying. How can she want to control government and yet hate it so much?

How can she hate bureaucracy and yet want to control the biggest bureaucracy that we have? Because government is inevitably, and there is no way around this, bureaucratic.

I don't know. Unless we presume that what she wants to do is create new elites and new power structures, a new system of control, which are fundamentally different to those which have gone before.

Now maybe that is exactly what she is saying. And I am reading between the lines of this document and between the lines of what she said when she was elected very recently to be leader.

She said the Conservatives have to go back to their roots and reimagine what it means to form a government in the future. Is she saying, and it seemed to be the case that she is, that everything that the Conservatives have been doing when in office is wrong? Is she saying, like Liz Truss, that, frankly, the Conservatives have moved so far to the left, in her view, as was the view of Liz Truss, that she has to drag them into a totally different space?

Is she saying that education for most people is wrong because they then might question the system, which she believes she must have control of?  Is she challenging the right to literally challenge, which is what a good education encourages the person to do?

I believe she is doing all those things. I believe her paranoia about education is quite simply that it means that people, when they are informed, understand that there need to be balances in society to ensure that everyone has a chance to prosper. Whereas she takes the view, and I think it's a eugenic view, that there are some who are naturally entitled to prosper. And the rest are destined to serve.

That is what I think she's arguing. And my belief as an educator is that we have done our duty if we create people who challenge the worldview that Kemi Badenoch represents.

I am, therefore, delighted to be Kemi Badenoch's problem. It's my aim to be her problem. It's the aim of most of my university colleagues throughout the UK to be Kemi Badenoch's problem. Because our goal in life is to create people who question, challenge and change systems for the better.

But she wants none of that. She wants to go back to a past, as she sees it, where power was ensconced in the hands of a few who ruled imperially without challenge from the masses. And that is the last thing that I think this country wants.


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