Time to step aside, Gavin Williamson. Step forward, Kemi Badenoch
Kemi Badenoch MP (Chris Radburn/PA)
Seldom has there been such a consensus across the political spectrum to match the conviction that Gavin Williamson is not the right person to be trusted with the education of the next generation. Two A-level fiascos in two years cannot only be put down to the pandemic. Nor can the widening chasm in results between the privately educated and the rest, given the failure of the Education Secretary to keep his promise to the least affluent that they would not be failed by the switch to online learning.
Williamson has now been in office for longer than most of his predecessors, but it is already clear that his departure will be unlamented. In Westminster there is already talk of Kemi Badenoch, the Exchequer Secretary, being lined up to replace him, though no reshuffle is likely until the new year. In a bid to capitalise on his previous job as Chief Whip, the increasingly desperate Williamson is said to have been telling colleagues that “he knows where the bodies are buried”. Such a pitiful attempt to blackmail the Prime Minister is unlikely to achieve anything except a swift return to the back benches.
As the most junior member of the Treasury team, Kemi Badenoch has made her biggest impact wearing her other hat as Minister for Women and Equalities. Since entering Parliament in 2017 as MP for the safe Essex seat of Saffron Walden, she has taken a robust view of “critical race theory” and its woke terminology, such as “white privilege”. Though she was born in Britain and has lived here since she was a teenager, Ms Badenoch is not afraid to use her Nigerian background as a weapon in the culture war.
Last June she delighted her colleagues and infuriated opponents by arguing that “an intense focus on race” was inimical to the British sense of national identity. “As someone who grew up in Nigeria, where there is only one skin colour but more than 300 ethnic groups, the more ethnic identity is emphasised, the weaker national identity becomes. This is a dangerous trend for a multiracial society where we need to lean on what we have in common, not emphasise our differences.”
In an article for the Sunday Telegraph, Ms Badenoch was critical of a BBC video aimed at schoolchildren, viewed three million times, which claimed that white children needed to understand their “privilege” to make society “fairer and more equal”. Pointing to evidence that white working class children may actually have worse educational outcomes than their black counterparts, the Equalities Minister added: “We should not carelessly use skin colour as a proxy for disadvantage.”
This is fighting talk and Kemi Badenoch is not afraid to take the fight to Labour. As a black woman married to a white man with mixed-race children, she represents a rapidly growing part of the community for whom old-fashioned arguments and sensitivities about race are largely irrelevant. As Education Secretary, she could be expected to pay more attention to conservative school reformers such as Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the highly successful Michaela School in Wembley and a contributor to TheArticle. Ms Birbalsingh is a staunch supporter of a knowledge-based curriculum, classroom discipline and traditional values. It is striking that Britons with an ethnic minority background such as Badenoch and Birbalsingh are often much more at ease as champions of patriotism than their white colleagues, who fear accusations of racism.
Having tipped Kemi Badenoch as a future Conservative leader already in 2019, I am naturally pleased that she is now poised for promotion. (She has given birth to a baby, her third, in the meantime.) However, she will be well aware that her new prominence will inevitably attract envy and criticism. In some cases, the fact that she is black will be used against her on the Left. Her promotion to Education Secretary would be Labour’s worst nightmare.
Last March she was told to “consider her position” as Equalities Minister by Jayne Ozanne, a Government LGBT adviser who resigned her post because of the failure to ban conversion therapy. She attracted more criticism during a Commons debate in April over the controversial report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, led by Tony Sewell, who is black. After Labour’s Dawn Butler denounced Sewell and his “racial gatekeepers” in vituperative terms, Ms Badenoch defended them thus: “It is wrong to accuse those who argue for a different approach as being racism deniers or race traitors. It’s even more irresponsible, dangerously so, to call ethnic minority people racial slurs like ‘Uncle Toms’, ‘coconuts’, ‘house slaves’ or ‘house negroes’ for daring to think differently.”
The minister has evidently been on the receiving end of such slurs and has grown a thick skin as a result. It is hard to imagine any of her white colleagues on the Conservative front bench using language like this to hit back at Labour. Kemi Badenoch can refresh the parts of the body politic that most other Tory politicians cannot reach. It is high time that she was given the chance to do so.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.
