A British Politician Shocks the Press by Saying a True Thing

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

In Britain, an attempt is under way to transmute the impressive MP Kemi Badenoch into the second coming of Bad Enoch. Her crime? To have said aloud what ought to be perfectly obvious to all and sundry: that “not all cultures are equally valid.” “I am not talking about cuisine,” Badenoch told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “I am talking about customs.” Among the cultures that Badenoch listed as “less valid” were those in which women have fewer rights than men, those that celebrate child marriage, those that foster antisemitism, and those that persecute homosexuality. These, she concluded, ought not to be imported into the United Kingdom.

 

As one might expect, many within the English press treated this observation as if it were self-evidently scandalous. Badenoch, it was suggested, had not only “sparked a row” but had shown the temerity to provoke some criticism on TV. Even worse, her interview with the BBC had yielded a “tense clash” — the mere existence of which was deemed to be “extraordinary.”

                                        

To which one is obliged to ask: Really? As it so happened, I watched Badenoch’s interview in full, and I took two things away from it. First, that Badenoch was calm, coherent, and persuasive throughout. Second, that she was so obviously correct in her suppositions that it is tough to imagine how anyone could earnestly disagree. Within the very first minute of the conversation, Badenoch proposed that “it is extraordinary that people think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say.” Indeed it is. Preemptively dispensing with the suggestion that her stance had anything to do with race — “I’m a black woman sitting here talking to you,” she noted pointedly — her case consisted of nothing more complex or contentious than that the “values” that made Britain great remain superior to most of their alternatives. Is there anyone in the West who is surprised to hear this claim?

 

That’s not a rhetorical question. Naturally, most conservatives would agree with Badenoch’s view — as, I suspect, would the vast majority of steadfastly apolitical normies. For us conservatives, such a view is foundational. Liberal democracy is superior to authoritarianism; capitalism is preferable to socialism; equality under the law is better than the rigorous observation of caste; and protection of individual rights is the bedrock of civilized life. But, while non-conservatives and non-normies may differ from us in important ways, don’t they advance a structurally similar brief? The 1619 Project, for example, is undoubtedly an indictment of America, but it is not an agnostic one. It prefers emancipation over slavery, the Union over the Confederacy, and its prescribed policies over the cultural status quo. When pressed to draw comparisons between the Anglosphere and everywhere else, the contemporary Left exhibits all manner of hypocrisy, myopia, and obfuscation on the specifics — if you want to spend a fun five minutes, ask a progressive about the culture in Alabama and then about the culture in Iran — but it is nothing if not culturally judgmental. Whether it likes to admit it or not, the vast majority of the criticisms that the Left advances boil down to the West not being Western enough.

 

That rabbit hole to one side, the historical case in support of Badenoch’s conceit is so strong as to defy refutation. Her comments came in the midst of a debate over immigration that exists only because the superior institutions of the Western world have made it a magnet for aspiring outsiders. Both of the core reasons that foreigners hope to move to the United States, Britain, Australia, and other free societies — those being the presence of remarkable economic opportunity and the protections accorded by the rule of law — are the product of historical choices that have borne luscious fruit. The country that Badenoch hopes one day to lead was instrumental in the abolition of slavery, the development of capitalism, the invention of modern industry, the protection of free speech, the evolution of democracy, and the establishment of written law. Britain’s history is not perfect, as none written by man will ever be, but it is sufficiently noble to have created a situation in which the daughter of Nigerian immigrants feels moved to protect and to lionize it on national TV — even when she knows that to do so will invite all the slings and arrows that the country’s ingrates are able to muster.