Today in Parliament,14 October 2025, Kemi Badenoch delivered a speech ( cited below article ) she framed as a moment of moral clarity. It was solemn, precise, and emotionally charged. But beneath the surface, it was something else entirely; a choreography of grief, hierarchy, and strategic forgetting. This wasn’t just a political intervention. It was a performance of loyalty: to whiteness, to empire, and to a moral grammar that selectively grieves and violently erases.
She opened with three mothers, their children stolen into “terror tunnels.” It was visceral. Human. Designed to anchor the listener in righteous suffering. Israeli grief was named, sanctified, and central. Palestinian grief? Abstract. Passive. Instrumental. No names. No families. No history.This wasn’t oversight. It was architecture.
She declared, “No cause, no grievance, that can ever justify…”a line that shuts the door on context. No mention of the Nakba. No mention of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled, the 530 villages destroyed. No mention of Israel’s ongoing land grabs, including the largest seizure in decades last year. No mention of the UN confirming Israel committed four of five genocidal acts in Gaza. No mention of famine. No mention of the 67,000 Palestinians killed. No mention of apartheid, war crimes, or the rubble that used to be homes.
Instead, she praised Trump. Praised the Abraham Accords. Praised the United States for doing the “hard yards.” Britain, she said, was “out of the loop,” “delusional,” diplomatically irrelevant. She admired strongman diplomacy, clarity, force, conditionality. She aligned with empire, not justice.
She condemned the UK’s decision to recognise the State of Palestine, calling it a move “praised by Hamas” and a “moral failure.” That alone reveals her worldview. She treats Palestinian statehood as a reward, not a right. She equates recognition with terrorism. She rejects global consensus. And she reinforces a hierarchy where Israel is a partner, and Palestine is a problem.
Domestically, she securitised grief. She called for increased protection for British Jews (rightly), but said nothing about Islamophobia, even as it surges across the UK. She linked immigration to extremism, demanding ideological vetting for anyone from Gaza. This wasn’t about safety. It was about hierarchy. About who gets to belong, who gets to grieve, and who gets erased.
And here’s where her identity enters the room.
Blackness wasn’t erased. It was weaponised. Her presence allowed her to speak with moral authority while reinforcing settler colonial logic. She performed loyalty to whiteness, civilisation versus terror, clarity versus nuance, Israel versus Islamist extremism. This wasn’t assimilation. It was inversion. Her Blackness became a scalpel—cutting away solidarity, sanitising empire, shielding power from critique.
She invoked “Islamist terror” again and again. It wasn’t analysis. It was emotional shorthand. “Islamist” is a buzzword engineered to evoke ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the worst forms of violence. It collapses Hamas into global jihad. It racialises threat. It casts Muslim identity as inherently violent, incompatible with civilisation, and always suspect. It justifies surveillance, border hardening, ideological vetting—especially of brown and Black Muslims.
Jewish hostages were named, humanised, celebrated. Palestinian victims? Statistical. Passive. Politically inconvenient. She rewrote the narrative of grief. Jewish lives were sacred, central, actionable. Arab grief was conditional. Suspect. Disposable.
She severed the historical ties between anti-colonial movements, civil rights, and Palestinian liberation. No mention of Black–Palestinian solidarity. No recognition of shared struggle. No nod to global South resistance. She performed a version of Blackness that was sanitised, securitised, and stripped of radical memory.
This wasn’t just betrayal. It was choreography.
Her speech laid the groundwork for hardline immigration policies, ideological screening, and protest policing. She cast pro-Palestinian marches as “theatres of hate.” She reframed dissent as moral failure. She rebranded moral clarity as a Conservative virtue; unapologetic, unambiguous, and aligned with Israel.
This speech wasn’t about peace. It was about power. It wasn’t about hostages. It was about hierarchy. It wasn’t about clarity. It was about control.
And we must not forget what she chooses to forget.
So we have to ask; if this is how she speaks in opposition, what would she do in power? Is this the kind of person we want leading a country?
Someone who erases history to perform loyalty.
Someone who racialises grief and securitises identity.
Someone who weaponises her own Blackness to shield empire from critique.
Someone who praises genocide architects and calls it diplomacy.
Someone who treats Palestinian lives as inconvenient footnotes and protest as moral failure.
Someone who sees Palestinian statehood not as justice, but as a threat.
Leadership demands moral memory, not selective grief. It demands solidarity, not hierarchy. It demands clarity that includes context not clarity that erases it.
Kemi Badenoch should never be allowed near the levers of power. Not because she lacks conviction but because her convictions are built on erasure.
And we remember what she chooses to forget.
Transcript of her speech 14 October 2025
And I’m grateful to the Prime Minister for advanced sight of his statement. I remember almost 2 years ago, meeting 3 mothers, whose children had been stolen from them on October 7th, and held captive in terror tunnels. They were living a nightmare, unimaginable for any parent.
Many of us on these benches have met hostages, their families, heard their stories, and supported them. Yesterday, it was truly momentous to finally, finally see the return of the 20 living hostages who are now back home in Israel after over 730 days in terrorist captivity. The hostages released yesterday show superhuman endurance in the face of evil.
And we send every best wish to them and their families as they begin the process of rebuilding their lives. We also, those hostages killed by Hamas, and continue to call, for all their bodies, to be returned to their families. Mr. Speaker, we must never forget what happened on the 7th of October, 2023.
The abduction of men, women, and children was in calculated cruelty to break body, mind, and soul after, after reflecting in mindless horror of rape and murder. There is no cause, no grievance, that can ever justify what happened that day. I, for one, will never forget, and the response from some in the West, the equivocation, the indulgence in water boundary, and the drawing of false equivalence, shows how far moral clarity has eroded.
We have got a job to do here at home, Mr. Speaker, to fix this. So on these benches, we stand alongside Israel in our shared fight against Islamist terror. The conflict could have ended a long time ago if the hostages had been returned.
So many Palestinian lives have been needlessly lost because of this war. Mr. Speaker, Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organisation. A sustainable end to the suffering of civilians in Gaza means the complete eradication of Hamas and the dismantling of its terrorist infrastructure.
Even now, we know that Hamas is still killing Palestinians in Gaza. The initial phase of the
U.S. Back Peace Plan represents a significant breakthrough. I want to thank the U.S. administration, President Trump, and regional mediators for having secured this outcome.
They put in the hard yards and found solutions. making clear that all progress would depend on the release of the hostages. It conditioned that some other governments forgot. Mr. Speaker, with this peace deal, there is much to be hoped for in the Middle East.
If the Abraham accords are expanded, a new age of peace will have arrived. We’ll see diplomatic normalisation of Israel, with the Arab world, something many of us have longed to see. And it certains me that the Prime Minister’s statement does not appear to show that the U.K. was at the heart at the heart of any of these efforts specifically.
It is quite clear that UK relations with Israel have been strained by the actions of this government. Their view, and their stated publicly, is that it looks like under pressure from his own backbenches, the Prime Minister has taken the wrong decisions. Time and time again, diminishing or influence in the region.
It can shout shame as much as they want you, Mr. Speaker. Within weeks of labour coming into power, they decided to restore funding to Onra. We haven’t forgotten.
An organisation, they say yes. an organisation whose members assisted in the kidnapping of these hostages. The release which we are celebrating today. Relations with Israel have been so damaged that when Israel, law strikes against
Iran, a country that has been a direct threat to us for years.
The UK was out of the loop. It may not like it, but it is the truth. And then, in a move praised by Hamas, Leva decided to recognise a state of Palestine with no condition to release the hostages still held in the tunnels of Gaza. rewarding terrorism.
They may jump in from a sedentary position. I will remind them of what the former British Israeli hostage,
Emily Demari, said. She called it a moral failure.
I’m surprised to hear the Prime Minister say, in his statement, that it was their contribution to this peace deal. We all know that the
U.S. Secretary of State Mark Perugio condemned this recognition, saying it had made ceasefire negotiations harder. That is what the U.S. said.
The truth is, as historic events have unfolded in the Middle East, Britain has been out of step with the U.S. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, even called the government’s claim that it played a key role in the ceasefire, delusional. Something Israeli foreign ministers agreed with. Mr. Speaker, I welcome the Prime Minister’s promise to scale up protection for Jewish people in our country.
Britain has always been a sanctuary for British Jews. But after the tragic murder of two British Jews outside a synagogue in Manchester, the governments must now do everything he can to eradicate anti Semitism. The anti Israel protesters who have turned our streets into theatres of hate have been relatively silent about the good news of a ceasefire and hostage return, showing us their real motivation.
The Prime Minister mentioned in his statement, the Palestinian authority, can he tell us whether the government’s preference for the Palestinian authority to take the reins in Gaza? If they have committed to end the pay for slave policies, the reward families of terrorists for killing is raised. Will it deal with anti Semitism in education, and are they demonstrating any democratic progress?
Mr. Speaker, there are also domestic implications. We need to strengthen our borders. Hamas is still running Gaza.
Those who will be allowed to leave can only do so with her master’s approval. We shall not be bringing anyone to Britain with links to extremism, anti Semitism, or to mass, and other terrorists. So can the Prime Minister confirm whether he intends to bring people from Gaza to study for healthcare or for other purposes?
And what measures are in place to ensure we are not importing extremism, anti Semitism, or anyone linked to her mass and other terrorists? Mr. Speaker, Britain is in great country and still a powerful one. We still have agency to shape the world around us.
The government must do better and show it has the backbone to use Britain’s power to make a better world.
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