Kemi Badenoch: How Liberalism Got Hacked

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.