Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch in 2022

Olukemi Olufunto "Kemi" Badenoch (/ˈbeɪdnɒk/ BAYD-nok; née Adegoke, 2 January 1980) is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for Business and Trade since 2023 and President of the Board of Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities since 2022. She previously held a series of junior ministerial positions under Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, in 2017 she was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Saffron Walden in Essex, having previously served as a Member of the London Assembly. Badenoch supported Brexit in the 2016 European Union membership referendum.

Quotes

• We live in a multiracial society, we're very, very comfortable with that because if were weren't we wouldn't have the prime minister, we wouldn't have the home secretary or business secretary that we have. But we have to be very careful about how we explain and express immigration policies so that people aren't getting echoes of things that are less palatable.
  • From a speech at a fringe meeting during the Conservative Party conference (3 October 2023), as cited in "Suella Braverman warns of ‘hurricane of migrants’ — as it happened", The Times
  • Suella Braverman, the home secretary, had claimed multiculturalism in the UK had failed.

• It wasn't until predators started exploiting the loopholes that we are having to tighten this.
  It is the behaviour of people who are choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people — because the definition is very loose — that we are now having to look at what we can do in order to protect women and children who are the most vulnerable in those single-sex spaces.
  It is not easy, the ideal situation would have been if the predators had not chosen to exploit this loophole.
  [Badenoch "insisted she was not saying transgender people were predators."] But there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.
• [Predators exploitation of loopholes] We see it with men exposing themselves in bathrooms. We see it with people trying to access single-sex spaces such as women's prisons when they have been convicted for violence against women, and their victims are being forced to refer to them with female pronouns. That is not right.
  So we have to make sure that we can sweep all that away and when we do, life will get better for transgender people.
  • From a hearing of the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (13 December 2023), as cited in "Kemi Badenoch: We must protect single-sex spaces because predators outnumber trans people", The Times (14 December 2023)
  • See the Isla Bryson case. Bryson (previously known as Adam Graham), a convicted double rapist unquestionably male at the time of the offences, chose to identify as female after being charged in Scotland. After conviction in January 2023, Bryson was briefly placed in a women's prison.

• The law is confused because times have changed and words in law are being re-interpreted to meanings quite different from what legislators intended. Clarification is required. Not just to protect the privacy and dignity of women and girls, but also to protect those people with gender dysphoria for whom the law was set up to protect. These transpeople were going about their lives in peace, until predators started exploiting loopholes in the law by calling themselves trans with no evidence beyond their self-identification.
  Sex and gender, terms once used interchangeably in the law, now mean different things with significant implications. This is being exploited by all sorts of activist organisations, most notably Stonewall for their own agenda. That is why we are today pledging that, if we form a government after the [general] election, we will clarify that sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word. The protection of women and girls' spaces is too important to allow the confusion to continue.
  • Announcing a proposal to amend the Equality Act 2010 in "Tory vow to end abuse of gender laws by predators", The Times (2 June 2024)