Kemi Badenoch brands Reform a ‘woke party’ in bizarre interview with Ed Balls

The Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has had a strange few days. Fresh from defending selecting a former neo-Nazi as a Tory council candidate (he’s now been dropped, but been appointed as a party adviser instead), she’s now decided to describe Nigel Farage’s hard-right outfit as ‘woke’.

Badenoch made the comments in a lengthy interview with Ed Balls on the Political Currency podcast.

On the podcast, Badenoch said: “I want people to know that I’m not doing any deals with Nigel Farage,” saying that this applied pre-election and that “I don’t even see how we could do any kind of deal post-election. In my view I think deals post-elections are stitch-ups, so I just say no to everything.”

She went on to say that the Tories were politically distinct from Reform, telling the podcast: “I don’t want people to be confused about what this Conservative Party stands for. We are not just different from Labour, or even different from the old Conservative Party. We are also different from Reform.”

Balls then asked Badenoch what that biggest difference between the two parties is. Her answer was surprising to say the least.

She said: “Reform are a woke party”.

The term ‘woke’ originates in the USA and was popularised in the 2000s to describe someone who is awake or alert to injustice – particularly in relation to racial discrimination. Increasingly the term is used pejoratively by the right, typically when referring to policies or practices that are designed to address inequalities – often as a replacement for the term ‘political correctness’.

That hardly seems to apply to Reform, and it may well be the first time in human history that Farage has been called ‘woke’.

Nevertheless, Badenoch seems to have her own definition of the term, going on to tell Balls: “The word woke is used to mean many things, a lot of people assume it’s a left-wing thing.

“But when I talk about woke, I talk about people who, it’s all grievance, it’s victim narratives, people are doing this to us, oppressor narratives, this is the oppressor class.

“On the left it’s whites are the oppressors or men are the oppressors, on the right it’s the establishment are the oppressors, look at what they’re doing to us.

“It’s all moaning and whingeing and not proper solutions. It’s about power dynamics and how to get power, not actually solutions and how to fix things.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward