Kemi Badenoch says Britain is ‘the best place to be black’... no thanks to the Tory party

Badenoch condemned a narrative that ‘tells children like mine that the odds are stacked against them’, while propping up a government that is deliberately stacking those odds, writes Femi Oluwole

Business secretary Kemi Badenoch said she tells her children that ‘this is the best country in the world to be black’ (PA)

In Kemi Badenoch’s Tory conference speech, she said she tells her children that “this is the best country in the world to be black”. Sadly for her, fairytales don’t work on people who have finished primary school. Not when those fairytales go directly against the data on her own government’s website.

I’ll be fair to her: what she said could mean two things. She might have been referring to the simple fact that the UK is one of the richest countries in the world, so it’s one of the best places in the world to be... in general. However, I couldn’t find a single “Quality of Life” index where the UK ranked in the top 10. US News placed us at 13. Also, according to the government’s website, black people are more likely to be in poverty than any other group, so the UK may be at 13 – but not all of it.

Or maybe she meant that other countries treat black people worse than the UK does...? Her government passed a Policing Act that they admitted would target black people, but called it “objectively justified”. So if that’s what she meant, it feels a little like an abusive partner saying, “he would hurt you far more, so you’d better stick with me”.

This government loves to use international comparisons to cover up the fact that they’ve been making life in the UK harder than it needed to be.

Their own race report highlights that people with African-sounding names have to send 80 per cent more job applications to get a call-back for interview, even with identical CVs. That means they know it’s harder for black people to get jobs and escape poverty. Their Beating Crime Plan acknowledges the link between poverty, a lack of opportunity to escape poverty and turning to crime. And they then use the fact that black people are more likely to live in high-poverty areas as their “objective justification” for over-policing black people.

The reality of that discrimination is widely known, but have the Tories got employers to start using anonymous CV hiring processes? Have they made the school curriculum reflect the contributions of people from other ethnicities, to avoid the belief that everything good comes from white people?

Or have they published reports that denied institutional racism so blatantly, that the United Nations accused them of trying to normalise white supremacy? Have they attacked every effort to improve equality as too “woke”, a word which literally means an awareness of and opposition to social injustice? In Jeremy Hunt’s speech, he attacked the use of equality and diversity officers, then implied that Nigel Farage losing his bank account was a failure of diversity and equality. All that in the space of 30 seconds.

Badenoch, meanwhile, condemned “a narrative that tells children like mine that the odds are stacked against them”, while propping up a government that is deliberately stacking those odds.

The Tories have chosen the side of racism, but Badenoch is there to pretend otherwise in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. She actually cited Martin Luther King’s speech, saying “people should be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”.

This is the “I don’t see colour” approach to racism, which pretends that equality has already been achieved, so there’s no need to fix society. Martin Luther King literally called it “a dream”, i.e. something that has not yet been achieved. Badenoch wants us to believe MLK stopped talking about race after that speech, to avoid what Badenoch calls “racialising society”.

But we know why, in a party that is 97 per cent white, a black MP is the one publicly denying UK racism, despite it being a matter of public record. Right-wing commentator Dominique Samuels exposed this phenomenon recently. She reported that the Daily Mail had written “racist” and racism-denying articles and asked her, a black woman, to put her name to it. There will always be someone from every marginalised background who is willing to deny the struggles of others from that background, thus preventing meaningful solutions, for money and power.

Our equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, must be so proud.