Kemi Badenoch’s Black Saviourism and the Dangers of ‘Being Included’

On Wednesday, 26 February 2025, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK House of Commons, the following exchange took place between The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer and Mrs Olukemi (Kemi) Olufunto Badenoch (née Adegoke), the leader of the opposition Conservative Party.

Mrs Badenoch: Turning to the details of the plan the Prime Minister set out yesterday, over the weekend I suggested to him that he cut the aid budget, and I am pleased that he accepted my advice—[Laughter.] It is the fastest response I have ever had from the Prime Minister. However, he announced £13.4 billion in additional defence spending yesterday. This morning, his Defence Secretary said the uplift is only £6 billion. Which is the correct figure?

Prime Minister: “I’m going to have to let the leader of the opposition down gently: she didn’t feature in my thinking at all. I was so busy over the weekend I didn’t even see her proposal. I think she’s appointed herself the saviour of Western civilization; it’s a desperate search for relevance.” [bold emphasis, the author’s]

The Prime Minister was referring to the incessant crusade by Mrs. Badenoch to save white British society from brown and Black immigrants. Invariably, her public statements tend to warn white citizens of the UK of the dangers of the ‘wrong type’ of immigrants and of what the right-wing labels ‘woke culture’. In effect she has positioned herself as the ‘Black Saviour’ of the UK.

Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Sells

In February 2025,  BBC News reported that Mrs. Badenoch’s first major policy announcement after becoming leader of the Conservative Party was that ‘migrants on work visas who claim benefits will be barred from settling indefinitely in the UK’, and that ‘the period before migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain - which paves the way for British citizenship - should be extended from five to 10 years’. Badenoch, whose mother came to the UK in 1980 to give birth so that Kemi could benefit from birthright citizenship (a practice common amongst middle class Nigerians before it was ended in 1981), and who left the UK only to return at the age of 16 to take advantage of free schooling to university level, is prepared to deny basic right to migrants who are legally working in the UK.

In their recent 14 years (2010-2024) in power, some sections of the Conservative Party have thrived by using Black and brown politicians to spout their racist views of immigrants, and to enact policies that extended the former Home Secretary, Theresa May’s, ‘hostile environment’ - one that willfully denied citizenship to elderly Black Caribbean people (popularly known as the Windrush Generation) who had lived in the UK for decades. The infamous ‘Rwanda Plan’ to export desperate refugees to hotels in Kigali was championed by Rishi Sunak, a brown Prime Minister, whose family fled from East Africa. 

Why do the successful sons and daughters of immigrants feel the need to deny opportunities to those who follow in their footsteps?  This phenomenon is not peculiar to the UK. It also arises in the US and in mainland Europe. Some popularly term it ‘pulling up the ladder’. It has not been given much scholarly attention, but perhaps it should. 

Host societies tend to homogenize racialized immigrants and refugees, when researchers know that they are differentiated by class, gender, age, sexuality, religion and other ideologies. Elite/wealthy immigrants move almost seamlessly from one county to another. Some adopt a transferable global cosmopolitan culture that includes drinking Starbucks coffee wherever they are in the world. Citizenship and residency can be bought, if you have enough capital. France 24 reported, in late February 2025, that the ‘U.S. President Donald Trump floated the idea of replacing the [EB-5] visa program for foreign investors with a so-called "gold card" that could be bought for $5 million as a route to American citizenship’.

While in the West, Black African migrants are racialized into one group, a closer examination will see a polyglot - elites, barely surviving middle classes, and poor working class/small farmer, and destitute refugee groups. In their countries of origin, the social divisions can be quite sharp, such that middle classes and elites, living in highly unequal societies, will have domestic servants, aka ‘house helps’, who, in some cases, are severely exploited. These elites have no empathy with the poor and might even despise them for being poor. In Africa, many attribute their own wealth to ‘God’s blessings’ and may be fierce Christian Pentecostalists whose views about wealth despise the poor, accelerate a feeling of being under some curse, put pressure on adherents to get rich, or even serve as means for prosperity preachers to further exploit the poor. Of course, this belief contradicts Christian calls to support the poor, and to fight for and uplift the marginalized in society.

Migrating with these one-sided views of blessed rich and cursed poor will have implications for mistreatment of the poor and marginalised groups in host societies. By advocating cutting aid, dismissing reparations, and exiting international human rights law, Mrs. Badenoch appears to display some of the authoritarian tendencies in direct contrast to the ‘western liberal values’ her crusade wants to protect.

In response to the ‘Windrush Scandal’, the UK Home Office commissioned an historical study of Britain’s immigration laws, which was published in 2024, after repeated demands by advocacy groups. The report documents the slate of racist legislation introduced by successive UK governments since the Second World War in their attempts to limit the number of Black and brown immigrants, even though many were former citizens of the British Empire. The report notes the long existing ‘dysfunctional relationships between Britain’s institutions and Black and minority ethnic people[and that] The politics of Britain’s borders, which have been administered for more than a century by the Home Office, are now inextricably connected with race and with Britain’s colonial history’. Racist laws are embedded in the structure and institutions of British society.

In post Second World War Britain, especially up to the 1980s, immigrants, irrespective of their social class were subjected to the same racism. Black and brown people were homogenized and called the same racist names, regardless of country or class background. Up to the 1990s, the campaigns of anti-racist movements did not differentiate between people based on racist colour-coding. In the public domain, as immigrants, they were ‘all in it together’, even though some immigrants maintained colourism and anti-blackness within their ethnic groups. 

Being raised in the UK, residing in largely deprived white working-class neighbourhoods, attending schools that officially label Black children Educationally Sub-Normal, stopped and searched by the Police, refused accommodation and jobs based on your skin colour, constituted the lived experience of most Black people who have grown up in the UK, especially until the 1990s. For many, this experience of pervasive racism was signified by the murder of Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993, in Eltham London, and the institutional racism and gross injustices that surrounded the case. Mrs. Badenoch’s criticism of the benefits of multiculturalism and denial of Black people’s lived experience of racism will not erase white supremacist thinking from British society, in fact her actions bolster it. Judging by comments in social media, some white people are delighted that a Black woman is suppressing Black people’s equality aspirations and is, inadvertently, legitimizing white racism, by ‘saying it as it is’- so it must be true. 

More Representation, less Solidarity

Black and brown solidarity ended as the entrenchment of neoliberalism pushed competition for resources that resulted in the fragmentation of social justice collectives. Some campaigners promoted greater political representation for minority communities. The argument was that since they were here to stay, they should actively participate in all areas of life, including parliament. In 1987, four Members of Parliament (MPs) from minority ethnic groups were elected (Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz).  Before then, the last time there was a minority MP was in 1929.  These new MPs belonged to the Labour Party, which was then seen as progressive and more open to diversity, although the Party’s enactment of draconian immigration legislation would say otherwise. Once it was recognized that Black and brown people were electable, campaigners promoting political representation acknowledged the diverse political ideologies that ethnic minorities held and encouraged all mainstream political parties to select parliamentary candidates from a wider ethnic pool. Badenoch is a direct beneficiary of the anti-racist activism to get minority ethnic politicians into government, as did many post 2010 Members of Parliament.

According to Statista.com, ‘In 2024, 90 of the United Kingdom's 650 Members of Parliament were non-white, 66 of which were members of the Labour Party, while 15 were in the Conservative party, and five non-white MPs were members of the Liberal Democrats’.

Similar data is not collected for the House of Lords, and the most recent estimate suggests that, in 2018, ‘around 6 per cent … came from an ethnic minority background, an increase from an estimated 3 per cent of members in 2000’. 

Kemi Badenoch’s political career began just at the time when the political parties started to realize that the minority ethnic vote was not confined to the Labour Party. To win in inner city constituencies, especially in London, they needed to court the minorities. Mrs. Badenoch was elected to the London Assembly as a Conservative member in 2015. In 2017, she was chosen to contest a safe Conservative Party seat and was elected Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden in Essex.  She held a number of junior ministerial roles, including Minister for Equalities, even though she appeared to oppose moves towards greater equality. It was at this time that her attacks against the UK’s Black and brown citizens came to the fore. Under Rishi Sunak premiership, Mrs. Badenoch was appointed as Secretary of State for Business and Trade, and Minister for Women and Equalities – an anathema since her position on maternity leave is regressive. She stated: ‘the exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there. We need to have more personal responsibility - there was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.’ In 2024, she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. 

With more diversity in government, Black and brown people in the UK have come under siege from people sharing their own skin colour being used as weapons against them. Black people have woken up to the fact that, as Ruha Benjamin, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, told an African American audience at Spelman College (an historically Black College): “Black faces in high places are not going to save us”. While greater representation is a necessary step to address inequalities, it is often done without acknowledging, and therefore addressing, the issue of structural and institutional racism. Race equality policies are drawn up in places where senior leaders will state that there is ‘no racism’, ignoring the workplace realities of their minoritized ethnic staff. White privilege and white supremacy become taboo topics, even whilst those same institutions espouse ‘freedom of speech’. The writer Sara Ahmed notes that: ‘one of the ways you can deflect attention from racism is to hear racism as an accusation’[her emphasis]. When racism is heard as accusation, then public relations become an exercise: the response takes the form of individual or institutional reputation’.

This is not peculiar to the Conservative Party. Tony Blair’s New Labour also used Black people to suppress African people’s demands at an international level for reparations, and to garner African support for his war in Iraq. It seems that Black and brown political progress in the UK has come at the expense of the well-being of those communities. The question is: did those representatives ever see themselves as part of such immigrant communities? The answer might be only when it suited them. And here aspirations come to the fore.

Denying One’s Authentic Self

To be successful in a society that discriminates according to a visible, and an indelible, characteristic, such as skin colour, the upwardly-mobile must suppress all other aspects of difference (religion, language, food etc.), and take on those of the dominant group. This means hiding those characteristics that are seen as inferior and taking on those deemed superior – sometimes this is apparent in change of accent, clothing, marriage partner selection, and visiting new social spaces.  The sociologist Nirmal Puwar in her book Space Invaders, a study of race and gender in the UK’s House of Commons, argues that ‘black’ bodies in predominantly white spaces are incredibly visible as different, they are also under assimilative pressure to conform to the behavioural norm. They are expected to take on the ways and means (social codes) of upper/middle class whiteness’.  She continues: ‘there is little space for those who do not want to undergo self-erasure and conform to the cultural norm’. One could argue that in Mrs. Badenoch’s case, this involves dismissing the existence of ‘a Black community’ in the UK, and chastising Nigeria, the country in which she was raised, and other Commonwealth states. Irrespective of the malevolence of successive Nigerian governments, it is not diplomatic to denigrate the people and leaders of a country that you might have to work with if you aspire to be Prime Minister of the UK. 

To demonstrate that you are ‘not like them’, or that you have ‘evolved’--as the Belgian colonial administration described ‘civilized’ Africans–the wannabe Black person must take on as many of the attributes of the host society.  This is evident in Africans who have migrated as adults to the UK or to the USA (where they were among Trump voters). This behaviour can also be attributed to the gratitude that some immigrants hold for their host community (which is linked to their survival), the forms of intense dislike for their political country of origin (as they see any other system as preferable), and ignorance to the new political subtleties around them. Yet, as the writer Sara Ahmed asserts, in her study of diversity professionals, inclusion is always only partial.  

Prime Minister Starmer’s comment that Mrs. Badenoch’s was in ‘a desperate search for relevance’, cuts to the chase; that she is enacting ‘Black savourism’, an inversion of ‘white savourism’ – a term used to describe white people who feel that their whiteness gives them the right to rescue Africans from destitution and to guide them to the ‘promise land’ of western modernity. Mrs. Badenoch’s attacks on ‘critical race theory’, ‘social justice’, ‘equality’, ‘Muslims’ – all what she sees as threats to western civilization, signify an attempt to transcend her being as a ‘Black-skinned woman’ in an increasingly right-wing and xenophobic political party. 

While the Prime Minister’s remarks found resonance in the sentiments of Black observers of Mrs. Badenoch’s frequent attacks on their communities, they also signal her marginalization from elite British Society, even whilst holding one of the highest political offices. To echo the African American, Audre Lorde, the masters’ tools will not save her.

ENDNOTES

 ¹ Hansard, Prime Minister, Volume 762: debated on Wednesday 26 February 2025). Accessed at https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-02-26/debates/B31A4E15-80DE-4393-8067-F1B5DF77B385/PrimeMinister

² Henry Zeffman and Joshua Nevett, ‘Tories would bar benefit-claim migrants from settling in UK’, BBC News, 5 February 2025, updated 6 February 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c863eywwny2o

 ³ France 24, ‘Trump floats $5 million 'gold card' as a path to US citizenship’, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/trump-floats-5-million-gold-card-as-a-path-to-us-citizenship/ar-AA1zNaa5

 ⁴ France 24, ‘Trump floats $5 million 'gold card' as a path to US citizenship’, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/trump-floats-5-million-gold-card-as-a-path-to-us-citizenship/ar-AA1zNaa5

⁵ See The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an inquiry by Sir William Macpherson.  “https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry and The Macpherson Report Twenty-Two Years on at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmhaff/139/13903.htm

 ⁶ See, for example, Operation Black Vote (OBV), formed in 1996, at  https://www.obv.org.uk/). Here, the term Black was and remains inclusive of brown people. 

⁷ Statistas, ‘Number of Black and minority Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom from 1987 to 2024, by political party’, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123206/non-white-mps-in-uk-parliament-by-political-party/

⁸ UK Parliament, ‘In Focus: How ethnically and religiously diverse is the House of Lords?,  01 August, 2024. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/how-ethnically-and-religiously-diverse-is-the-house-of-lords/

 ⁹ Sam Francis, ‘Maternity pay has gone too far, suggests Kemi Badenoch’, BBC News, 24 September 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c781m9v4255o.

¹⁰ Yunik Foundation, ‘Ruha Benjamin: Black Faces In High Places Are Not Going To Save Us’, at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS6pM36MDrA].

¹¹ Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), 150-151.

¹² Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place. (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 150-151.

¹³ Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, North Carolina & London: Duke University Press, 2013).

 ¹⁴ Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essay and Speeches of Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, [1984] 2007).

Patricia Daley is a British-Caribbean academic and Pan-Africanist. She is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Her research is on migration and belonging.