“If something’s not working, you should stop it.” Say what you like about Kemi Badenoch, no one can match her when it comes to giving a straight-faced delivery of a self-undermining line. It’s matched only by her total confidence as she declares something demonstrably untrue. It’s like being talked down to by a four-year-old.
She was in Manchester for the Conservative Party conference. Events there are inevitably going to be overshadowed by last week’s murderous synagogue attack, but the conference was always going to be easy to miss. The place is deserted, even quieter than in the days of Covid. The bars are empty, the cafes refreshingly clear of queues. The protestors, usually everywhere, can’t be bothered to turn up. Out of government, and barely in opposition, the Tories have never been less relevant.
Luckily, Badenoch had a plan to seize back the agenda. It was, a press release announced, “serious and credible”. Although actually saying this was a bit of a tell. Perhaps officials were worried that their seriousness and credibility was undermined by the fact that their very next sentence explained that the first letters of each of the immigration plan’s seven points spelled out a word. Nothing says serious and credible like delivering a policy announcement as a Wordle.
The seven-letter word was “BORDERS”, a missed opportunity when “BATSHIT” was right there. It is a serious and credible promise to deport 150,000 people a year, without reference to the courts, using a new Removals Force “modelled on the success of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency”.
Really? Is it possible that no one in the Conservative Party has been following what ICE gets up to? Perhaps things are so bad that the party can no longer afford a TV license. The BORDERS document has a page headed: “Case study: The United States of America, 2025”, a phrase we’re going to see quite frequently in the coming decades.
Sadly there was no time in Badenoch’s BBC interview to go into the question of whether the people of Britain really want gangs of masked thugs wandering the streets and charging into workplaces grabbing anyone they think is the wrong colour. “That is the first ‘R’ in our BORDERS plan,” Badenoch said, seriously and credibly.
But it will not be long before people do start asking this question, again and again and again. Many of us in Britain stare in bafflement at US Republicans going along with things that they must fear they will one day struggle to explain to their grandchildren, possibly on visiting day in a federal prison. But they are constrained by party loyalty. There is no obligation for Britain’s Conservatives to handcuff themselves to Donald Trump. How much would you be willing to bet that ICE won’t, in the next three years, be involved in some kind of horror show of the sort that will dominate headlines for weeks? Would you bet your political future on it? Because Badenoch just has.
Or perhaps you take a sunnier view of life across the pond. Asked about her plan to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, Badenoch was blunt: “America’s not in that agreement!” Let us slide past the obvious-to-some reason why the USA might not have signed a European treaty, and take Badenoch’s serious and credible intended point: that you don’t need the ECHR to protect people’s human rights. It’s an interesting argument, but — and I’m just spitballing here — maybe pick a country that isn’t currently deploying troops against its own citizens?
Out of government, and barely in opposition, the Tories have never been less relevant
Not, of course, that we have to fly 3,000 miles for an example of what might happen if we just let the Home Office choose who to deport, with no appeal and no pesky lawyers involved. “People don’t need a lawyer,” a seriously and credibly sweaty Chris Philp told an emptying conference hall later. “They just need to tell the truth.” This was not, of course, enough to save the people deported in the Windrush scandal, over which a Conservative home secretary had to resign. You’d think he’d remember that, but I suppose the last government saw so many resignations that it’s hard to keep track.
Where would these 150,000 people go, Laura Kuenssberg asked Badenoch. “Not here.” Wait what? “I’m tired of us asking all these irrelevant questions.” With due deference to Badenoch’s oft-mentioned engineering background, “where will this plane land?” does seem like a question that is at least a little bit relevant in the hours before take-off. Perhaps her plan is that the planes full of refugees will simply take off and circle the skies for ever. Is it possible that this engineer was off sick the day they taught gravity?
Remember, this isn’t a plan that Badenoch has just plucked out of the air. “When I announce something,” she assured us, “I think about how it’s going to impact people.”
For instance, a couple of hours later, Badenoch denounced plans for identity cards on civil liberties grounds. But her serious and credible BORDERS plan will rely partly on “facial recognition systems without warning signs”. This technology famously struggles with non-white faces, though it’s possible the Tories view this, in the lingo of software engineers, as a feature, not a bug.
There’s something fascinating about listening to Badenoch. Every utterance demands a dozen more questions, most of them: “Are you quite sure you mean that?” But she sails on oblivious. “No more making the announcement first and then working out the policy detail second,” announced a woman who had, just hours earlier, described details as “irrelevant”. Serious and credible.
If you’ll forgive a personal aside, my son has just started A-Level politics, leading to all sorts of after-school conversations about the way Britain is run and the nature of representative democracy. And all of these, four weeks into the course, are conducted at a higher level of sophistication than the average interview with the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
Will seriously and credibly promising to deport Sir Mo Farah and Paddington Bear – both would be caught by the new plan – turn things around for the Tories? There are — how shall I put this — particular reasons why Badenoch may struggle to pick up the votes of people most obsessed with questions of race and nationality. If something’s not working, you should stop it.
