I like being a tradition warrior, says Conservative chief Badenoch

Conservative chief Kemi Badenoch has welcomed being labelled a “tradition warrior”.

In a speech in Washington DC, she stated being criticised for this by “the left-wing media” was meant to be an insult, “however I like the title”.

Her grandfather instructed her she was descended from warriors, so she was “maintaining the custom”, she quipped.

The time period “tradition conflict” is mostly utilized in a detrimental approach to describe a political battle between opposing values, typically targeted on social points reminiscent of gender politics.

Badenoch met Speaker of the US Home of Representatives Mike Johnson in DC as she seeks to construct hyperlinks with senior Republicans forward of Donald Trump’s return to the White Home subsequent month.

In a put up on X, she stated they mentioned constructing alliances in “a centre-right resurgence” throughout the West.

The Tory chief is just not anticipated to fulfill President-elect Trump throughout her go to.

Badenoch has beforehand resisted the “tradition warrior” tag, insisting throughout her profitable management marketing campaign she didn’t like preventing – however was ready to struggle to defend Conservative rules.

Her “tradition warrior” feedback got here in a speech at a dinner hosted by the Worldwide Democracy Union, a worldwide alliance of centre-right events.

She stated she believed in custom, including “if we do not defend our tradition, who will?”

She stated she additionally believed in freedom – free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of faith, “trusted establishments throughout the rule of regulation, and equality underneath the regulation, regardless of who you might be or the place you come from”.

However liberalism had “been hacked”, socially and economically, by politicians on the left, Badenoch argued.

“I fear that we’re dropping what made our nations nice,” she stated.

Badenoch, who grew to become Conservative chief final month, stated “opposing ideologies” have been taking on and undermining the tradition and establishments that had created area for them.

She accused the left of utilizing “oppression narratives” whereas being “not that concerned with ethnic minorities besides as a instrument to struggle their battles in opposition to the proper”.

Anti-racist teams, she stated, have been deciding that every one white individuals have been racist and campaigning in opposition to “white privilege”.

The environmental motion, she added, had been taken over by a “radical inexperienced absolutism” about internet zero.

Feminism, she complained, “does not know what a girl is any extra”.

She known as for conservatives to struggle again, by standing up for a “muscular liberalism” and curbing “the expansion of activist authorities”.

Badenoch’s strong, “anti-woke” views and no-nonsense fashion have made her standard with Conservative activists.

She has described left-wing college students at Sussex College, the place she gained levels in laptop methods and engineering, because the “spoiled, entitled, privileged metropolitan elite-in-training”.

As a junior equalities minister underneath Boris Johnson, she challenged the notion there was widespread institutional racism in Britain, saying she had skilled prejudice solely from left-wingers.

She calls herself a gender-critical feminist, and has been an outspoken opponent of strikes to permit self-certification of transgender identification, spearheading the earlier authorities’s blocking of Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Invoice.

She has additionally opposed gender-neutral bogs.

At this 12 months’s Tory convention in Birmingham, she made headlines with a declare that not all cultures have been “equally legitimate”.

Nor has she shied away from clashes with MPs on her personal aspect – together with when she rejected calls to make it unlawful to discriminate in opposition to individuals going by means of the menopause.

Showing earlier than a Commons committee, she instructed chair Caroline Nokes “a great deal of individuals” needed to make use of equalities regulation as “a instrument for various private agendas and pursuits”.