Kemi must turn Britain’s vice into virtue She needs to win back voters from Left and Right

As an immigrant from Nigeria at its most dysfunctional, Badenoch sees Britain as a haven of order. She has already offered her immigrant’s perspective on the virtues and flaws of British society to good effect. In interviews, when asked about her moral values, she describes herself as “an agnostic who is culturally Christian”. Would any current Labour politician dare to make such a remark? To understand its full significance, I found myself re-reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, a landmark book in political philosophy. It traces the early Christian origins of the ideas and institutions on which our distinctive notion of rights and duties in European and North American societies still rests.

The Nigeria that the young Badenoch left in 1996 lacked common national values, being riven by bitter divisions. Its north was largely an Islamic culture recognising a duty of submission to authority; its south was predominantly Christian fundamentalist; and around the country there were pockets of deference to pre-colonial kingship. Enabled by this lack of common moral foundations, a corrupt military dictator thrived, rewarding loyalty with commercial privileges.

Badenoch recognised that the Britain of 1996 was far more functional than the society she had left behind and was astonished to find her fellow students here denigrating it. They were taking for granted an inheritance that she realised must have been built by centuries of struggle and could easily be eroded. While such ideas have become deeply unfashionable within the liberal establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberals are in the minority — as Kamala Harris disastrously discovered. Badenoch may have the same skin colour as Harris, but her political philosophy and backstory edge closer to that of the Vice-President-Elect J.D. Vance. As a black immigrant, she can craft a credible and ethical Britain First agenda without taints of racism or imperialism.

Badenoch needs to start, though, by getting rid of the greedy stench of the Liz Truss package that still cloaks the party: the tax-cutting for the rich and public-service cutting for everyone else. This was widely recognised as morally repellent, alienating the many Conservative voters who fled to the Liberal Democrats. The worst news for Badenoch, according to YouGov, is that 59% of Liberal Democrat voters view her unfavourably, compared to only 13% favourably. She needs to use some of that hard-won flexibility to apologise for that greed-agenda and decisively renounce it. She must renounce, too, the financier vision of Singapore-on-Thames: such a programme would gift high-earners in the City and Canary Wharf rates of taxation comparable to the low level of Singapore. It’s an image that alienated many Tories. It dismissed the Britains beyond the Thames bubble — and sure enough, it was beyond the Thames that most Tory seats were lost. Many of those lost to the Liberal Democrats live in towns in the southwest; those lost in the Red Wall are on the east and west coasts. Here, there is further bad news for Badenoch: she is seen as Metropolitan — 23% of Londoners are favourable to her compared to only 18% of Northerners. It’s early days, but I have not detected any signs of this yet in her messaging.

With such negative ratings among Liberal Democrat voters, she should start by courting them. Historically, the NHS has been key to this cohort: David Cameron won the Tory leadership in 2007 by bolding stating that he was in politics to support the NHS — even during the ensuing austerity, the NHS’s budget was fully protected. Although Reeves has announced a huge increase in spending for the NHS, this will be a shocking waste of billions if it doesn’t come with reform. Gwyn Bevan’s How did Britain Come to This? sets out the coruscating evidence of how, over decades, the Treasury has repeatedly and grossly mismanaged the health sector. Powers and budgets should be torn from its incompetent maws and localised. But while she can gleefully use Bevan’s evidence to embarrass Starmer, the recent Tory record on health is so bad that I cannot see her outcompeting Ed Davey.

So what else could she do which would appeal to good-hearted Liberal Democrats, but also to the alienated voters of the Red Wall? She can prioritise healing the rift inherent in the two-tier country and the resulting “huge and persistent inequalities” which are such a block on growth. There was a flashpoint in Red Wall areas over the summer which perfectly illustrated the attitude of the Government to our divided country and pinpointed an opportunity for Badenoch: the riots.

What triggered this sudden outpouring of furious dissatisfaction? We can trace it back to Boris Johnson’s bragging incompetence that with Brexit we could “have our cake and eat it”; this ensured that the European Commission would not cooperate with continuing the Dublin Principle, which enabled us to return asylum seekers coming from mainland Europe. This casual disregard for the consequences of increasing immigration was compounded by a Whitehall decision to house these incomers in four-star hotels. Hell bent on value for money, the Treasury minimised the cost by choosing hotels in the poorest provincial towns. This penny-pinching reduced the cost per asylum seeker to the still staggering figure of £41,000.

These towns, though, were at the heart of the empty Tory promise to “Level Up”. The Treasury hated the programme and had released only £400 million for it — that’s a measly £8 per person in provincial Britain, barely enough to give the High Street a lick of paint. The contrast between this insulting parsimony and largesse to the asylum-seekers housed in the same towns was explosive. Inevitably, the powder-keg of resentment did attract racists, mostly from outside the town. But overall, the Government’s reaction — relying on the criminal justice system to quell the immediate effect of violence, rather than considering a longer-term approach to the root causes of alienation — fuelled the impression that the working class, and those who lived outside London, were considered second-class citizens. Contrast Labour’s reaction with Margaret Thatcher’s after the Toxteth riots of 1981, when she immediately dispatched Michael Heseltine to lead a programme of urban regeneration. Reeves, meanwhile, has dismissed not just the phraseology of Levelling Up, but even the notion that the divergence between London and provincial England matters: “there are poor people in London.” YouGov finds that Starmer is seen as being as metropolitan as Badenoch, but her big advantage is that whereas only 10% of voters have yet to make up their minds about him, 39% remain uncertain about her.

And so, Labour has left a wide-open goal. If Kemi Badenoch does nothing, many of the Red Wall voters who supported Labour in the last election will abstain or defect to Reform. But she already has the advantage, leading the more powerful opposition; Nigel Farage has little chance of ever being in government. She must therefore directly appeal to the disenfranchised and hold out the promise that she will help those left-behind towns and cities to renew themselves.

The Levelling Up programme, which as an unpaid advisor I saw from the inside, failed not just for lack of money. It failed, as the NHS is failing, through a lack of innovative vision. So here’s a thought for Badenoch. What provincial Britain needs, and wants, are jobs for those trained with vocational skills. By 2029, working class (CDE) under-25s will be approaching 30. Those in the North and Midlands will be worried about their lack of opportunities. Local governments will be bankrupt. Decent jobs can only come by helping the most innovative provincial SMEs to grow more rapidly. Such firms exist in their hundreds despite the hostile policy environment. But to grow fast, they need venture capital. Britain abounds in this, but two-thirds of it goes to London and its Oxbridge satellites. The other three-quarters of Britain’s population is a venture-capital desert. No wonder there’s no growth: the greater part of our island is a stagnation nation. The migration nation follows Kemi to London.

Back in the early days of those “wasted 14 years” dismissed by Labour, we created two valuable public investment agencies. The British Business Bank (2014) and the National Infrastructure Fund (2015) have the expertise to finance the public infrastructure and private-sector venture capital which will ultimately be the essential driver of growth. Rishi Sunak had no interest in them, and nor has Reeves, but they are a Tory solution to a national problem waiting to be harnessed. Kemi Badenoch could announce that their mandates would be to equalise economic opportunities around the country and commit to devolving decision-taking to them. Thereby, she would have in her holster a credible strategy that the rival opposition parties cannot offer, and that Reeves has opted to ignore. As she and the Prime Minister announced to the Board of BlackRock, her preferred solution to past short-termism is to set up a new unit within the Treasury. One of its tasks will be to craft an “industrial policy”. Yet the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall are so bereft of the necessary skills to formulate one that it can only lead to further embarrassments. To dig itself out of the comedy that HS2 ends at Royal Oak, the Treasury has just committed £6 billion to extend it to Euston: an “industrial policy” only for London.

Badenoch has the gumption to deride the pretensions of Whitehall and the wit to make it amusing. Keir Starmer is, it’s sad to say, the perfect foil for such barbs. By using her expertise in finance for a unifying public purpose, Badenoch would kill three birds with one stone. She would combine an inspiring backstory with an appealingly optimistic agenda to Britain’s youth: Cool Britannia Redux. She would test the moral mettle of those former Tories who switched to the Liberal Democrats repelled by the greed agenda. Equalising economic opportunities around the nation is something that Ed Davey can neither deride nor deliver. And she can win the provincial working class — the Red Wall voters adrift, already disillusioned by Labour, tempted by Farage, but knowing in their hearts that regardless of his rhetoric, he will never have the power to improve their lives. In the process, she can reset the image of her party vis-à-vis its biggest problem. In 2007, it was that the Tories could not be trusted with the NHS. David Cameron courageously and successfully took that bull by the horns. In 2024, it is that the Tories cater to a finance industry dominated by greedy asset-strippers. Let BlackRock carouse with Labour. By repurposing Britain’s financial renown to heal the divide in our society, Badenoch can turn vice into virtue. Forget stagnation nation and migration nation: we could become innovation nation.