I joined the Conservative movement in a very unusual way. I didn’t study politics or government at university. I’m not a lawyer. I’m an engineer. I like to know how things work—and I love to fix things that are broken.
Growing up, I saw a lot that needed fixing. I was born in 1980 in London, but I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. And Lagos was a place where almost everything seemed broken.
I was lucky to be born into a relatively wealthy family and had a decent education, but things changed. I learned quickly what it means to be poor as I watched my family’s income and savings inflated away by destructive government policies. They didn’t call it socialism—but it definitely was. There were times where I had to do homework by candlelight. At other times, when the state-run water company broke down, we had to dig for fresh water in a borehole a mile away.
There was no freedom of choice, either. The military government decided what school your child went to. It decided which businesses could or could not operate. It decided who to arrest without trial, and who deserved state-sanctioned murder.
So I know what freedom looks like because I have witnessed life without it.
Classic liberal values—not left-wing progressivism, but the classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law—all of those were missing when I was growing up as a child under military rule. And those values—that precious inheritance—are right now under grave threat here in the West.
Specifically, they have been hacked by ideologues operating on the inside. But if we can spot their trick, we can stop them from destroying the freest societies in the history of the world.
One of the reasons my party lost in the recent elections is that we didn’t recognize how the world was changing, and when we did, we did not adapt quickly enough. Specifically, there was complacency about the nature of the enemy we were fighting because a lot of people did not recognize it for what it was.
There’s a great movie from the 1990s—The Usual Suspects. In it, there is a fantastic quote: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”
That is the trick that those on the authoritarian left have pulled off. They have smuggled ideas and policies that look like liberalism but are anything but. They speak the language of the civil rights movement, but they aim to resegregate us. They preach about social justice, but they do not believe in the most basic ideas of fairness and equality. They demand our tolerance even as they seek to undermine the very culture and institutions that create that tolerance in the first place.
Another way of putting it is that liberalism has been hacked.
Let me give you an example.
The UK, like many countries, has generous laws to accommodate persecuted people who are seeking asylum. It was reported this year that one in seven asylum seekers who were housed together on a barge in southern England were converting to Christianity under the supervision of local church leaders.
I am not religious myself. But I am and always will be the granddaughter of a Methodist reverend—and I know the joy that comes to priests every time their flock grows. But I found it shocking that not a single one of these conversions was treated with any suspicion. Or it wasn’t until it was discovered that one “convert” was found to have committed multiple sexual offenses after arriving in the UK, and then went on to carry out a chemical attack in London on a mother and her two young children.
This is what I mean when I say that liberalism has been hacked. When a system that makes accommodations for the vulnerable is being exploited by opponents of that system, something needs to change.
A few other examples will drive the point home:
None of us want our countries to be invaded. So, of course, we are against imperialism. Suddenly, a group turns up saying they want to promote anti-imperialism. Sounds important. The government gives them money. They get university grants. They write textbooks and bring their worldview into the school curriculum. And suddenly you find that anti-imperialism is directed solely against our own country—or the West. They’re not criticizing China. They’re not attacking Russia. In fact, in some instances, they praise Russia, which is actively carrying out an imperialist agenda in Ukraine.
Or take the anti-racism movement. We are all against racism. So, a group turns up and says that they are anti-racist. It sounds good. But as it turns out, they’ve decided all white people are racist and the only way to be anti-racist is to be against white people because of their white privilege. This is nonsense—indeed, it is neo-racist. And it happens over and over and over again.
How about the environment? Conservative parties, by their very nature, are almost always rooted in rural communities; the original parties of the land, dedicated to leaving a better world for our children. For many years, conservatives happily worked with all parties to protect our natural world, and to tread carefully in how we used its riches. Yet, just as in so many other policy areas, these values were hacked. Conservation was replaced by radical green absolutism. Looking after our planet became an exclusive discussion about net-zero and anti-growth.
Even feminism, which was meant to promote the equal rights of women, has spent so much time diving into postmodernism and deconstructing the dialectic, it doesn’t know what a woman is anymore. Things got so upside down that in Scotland they were putting rapists in women’s prisons simply because the men declared themselves women.
We talk about free speech, and then our enemies use it to feed self-loathing propaganda to our children. We talk about freedom of religion, only to see those that do not want freedom use their religion and use their rights to take away the freedoms of others, as we just saw in the UK Parliament when a Labour MP demanded blasphemy laws. The right to protest, as we have seen countless times this year, is used as a cover to carry out intimidation of Jews and supporters of Israel. Posters of missing children and kidnapped hostages are ripped down, denying the freedom of others to be heard.
All of this is how liberalism has been hacked.
So how do we fix it? We need muscular liberalism and muscular conservatism. We don’t want to throw away any of the things that are good about our society—like our tolerance for difference, our pluralism, or our open-mindedness. But we need to police the boundaries, otherwise our opponents will blur them to the point where they no longer exist.
The first step is to explain the value of liberty. Our opponents do not value liberty. They see it as the freedom to do bad things, whether they are offensive or exploitative; that is all they think about. But liberty is foundational for a flourishing society, not just a philosophical “nice to have.”
The second thing we have to do is to stop the expansion of the state.
Too much rhetoric speaks of a smaller state as an end in itself. But it’s more than that. A smaller state is a means to secure a better way of doing things, allowing bureaucracy to focus and prioritize its resources. (This is why I am excited about DOGE and what president-elect Trump and Elon Musk will do on government efficiency.)
In recent years in the UK, the Conservative Party forgot the state’s purpose in our national life. The state expanded. Taxes went up. And we used state power to continue tinkering with every aspect of life in order to achieve equity. If we keep doing that, we will sleepwalk into a planned economy far more oppressive than thinkers of the twentieth century could ever have thought.
The third thing we have to do is to stop being afraid to defend our beliefs. Part of the problem is that, for the center-right, liberty has come to mean laissez-faire—that we should sit back and do nothing as the virtues and mores that have made us free are discarded. We are told that the culture war is a sideshow. That it’s not a hill worth dying on.
This is dead wrong.
The “do nothing” attitude that has characterized a lot of the center-right in recent years is deeply misguided. Freedom must be protected and nurtured with reference to important broader principles.
Among them: People should always be treated as individuals (ideologies that suggest otherwise must be passionately opposed). Due process must always be ensured (there can be no room for mob justice of any kind). The rule of law must be protected, and the law must be applied neutrally (and there can be no special treatment depending on identity).
If the West is only prosperous due to slavery and colonialism, if all its success is because of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormative oppression, there is a heavy price to be paid. That price is that our beliefs—democracy, equality before the law, meritocracy, free markets—are just fairy tales we tell ourselves to cover up a dark and murky past. There can be no resolution to the big problems of our age if we lose confidence in our history and the story of Western civilization. Everything depends on it.
When this doesn’t happen—when we don’t defend the things we believe in, when we fail to tell a story about our past and about our future, when we fail to give hope to young—a vacuum is created, and other beliefs fill this vacuum.
Two years ago this month my cousin, who was living in Canada, killed himself. He was 27 years old and had fallen down the social media and internet rabbit hole of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism—leftist movements I’d never even heard of.
He had spent months, we found out, probably years, reading and self-radicalizing, learning about how human beings were a plague on the world, that our very existence was destroying the planet. These movements promoted the idea that having children was wrong—evil, even—and that ending your life was a better way to stop the spread of misery around the world. It was heartbreaking to know that these ideas had filled his mind and tortured him.
He is, or was, one of a generation of young people that see nothing ahead of them but a bleak future. I worry that when we do not promote what we believe, or when we do not talk enough, things that matter, things that make life worth living, the importance of family or personal responsibility and how our beliefs and ideas are a force for good around the world, we fail to offer hope to the next generation.
That is, above all, our job. There is no cavalry coming. It’s just us. We have a job to do, and it’s not just to win elections. It’s to champion and defend the world-transforming values that allow those elections to exist in the first place.
Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party. This essay is adapted from a speech she gave to the International Democracy Union Forum in Washington, D.C., on December 5, 2024.