Conservative leader calls ‘pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism’ a ‘poison’ in speech at rightwing event. Kemi Badenoch has said “our country and all of western civilisation will be lost” if efforts to renew the Conservative party and drive forward rightwing ideas globally fail. Likening her own leadership to Donald Trump’s second term, she used a gathering of fellow conservatives to attack Keir Starmer for taking the knee in a nod to Black Lives Matter and described “pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism” as a “poison”.
Badenoch was speaking on the first day of a global gathering in London of conservative thinkers, politicians and businesspeople. The event is organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), whose backers include Paul Marshall, one of the owners of GB News, and Legatum, a private investment company. The Conservative leader sought to position her party as the true torchbearer in Britain of a new wave of conservatism. In an apparent dig at rightwing rivals, Badenoch said populism became corrosive if it was “anger without the ability to take action”.
Badenoch was cheered when she criticised the west’s “inheritance” as “the real poison of leftwing progressivism” and said the conference was part of her party’s renewal of policy and ideas. “Whether it’s pronouns, or DEI, or climate activism, these issues aren’t about kindness – they are about control. We have limited time and every second spent debating what a woman is, is a second lost from dealing with challenges.”.
She added:“If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt, or weakness, our country and all of western civilisation will be lost.”. Badenoch was speaking a day before Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and co-founder of ARC, will interview the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage. While thousands of delegates from dozens of countries are attending, the conference at the ExCeL centre has a strong Christian current running through it.
While religion does not explicitly feature in promotional material for the event, there is a religious influence on its direction from Peterson, who draws on the Bible in his work, and his ARC co-founder Philippa Stroud, a committed Christian credited with shapingthe Conservative party’s policies during the 2000s. The event’s approach to net zero and the climate crisis ranges from scepticism to outright hostility.
There was loud applause for the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, when he used a virtual address to describe the goal of reaching net zero by 2050 as a “sinister goal” and “lunacy”, claiming Britain’s politics in the area had impoverished the country. “I think the agenda might be different here than climate change. It’s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister,” he said.
Also speaking days after the US vice-president, JD Vance, sparked anger by launching a scathing attack on western European democracies, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, bemoaned what he said were poll findings that only one in five British adults considered themselves to be very patriotic. Johnson decried what he claimed was a weakening of national identity, saying: “If Americans are not Americans any more and Brits are not Brits any more and Germans are not Germans any more then naturally something else will fill the void.”.
He doubled down on the hardline “America first” attitude towards Nato and defence relations with previously close allies: “We must each take care of our own house before we take care of the neighbourhood,” he said in an address via a virtual link. Attenders included supporters of Europe’s older conservative movements, as well as the new generation of populist parties in Germany and Austria, Spain’s far-right Vox party, and the Fidesz party of Hungary’s self-styled illiberal democrat, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
From Britain, attenders included Lois Perry, a former Ukip leader who is heading a new UK branch of a US climate change denial group, Heartland Institute, which has taken funding from oil interests and US Republicans. Peterson has used his own X account to endorse the views of a far-right German politician on the climate crisis, which he described as a “totalitarian lie”. Peterson has also been a vocal supporter of Tommy Robinson, although he appeared to have dialled down his rhetoric in favour the jailed far-right activist during the conference.
Other panellists included Niall Ferguson, a historian who won applause from the hall by endorsing the comments made by Vance at the Munich Security Conference. Also appearing on a panel was the Labour peer and proponent of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement Maurice Glasman. The peer, who is on ARC’s advisory board, said he agreed with those at the event who believed that capitalism “desecrates humanity” when it treated human beings as commodities.
