Say what you like about Kemi Badenoch, but she has a very particular set of talents.
The most prominent of these talents is her ability to garner coverage in the media by saying something completely absurd, and then smugly cruising the wave of outrage from the left on the stable surfboard of her brand: ‘saying-the unsayable’.
This skill is useful, I’ll grant, for being a Tory MP. In fact, in the last (few) government(s), this ‘talent’ seemed to be mandatory for most cabinet members. Braverman, Patel, and Rees-Mogg all have such incidents to their name. The current iteration of the Conservative Party defines itself by being ‘anti-woke’, which generally involves trying to desecrate the basic rights of marginalised communities and then convincing a particular section of the electorate that ‘those’ people are to blame for any and all societal ills. Individualism, intolerance and disdain for difference has resulted in an ‘us-and-them’ mindset that has proved insidiously pervasive.
As far as I can tell, this mindset is what the former Women and Equalities Minister was attempting to tap into when she called maternity pay “excessive” in her Times Radio interview. Her comment was grounded in the conservative (both small and big C) idea of low taxation – so far, so normal. But, for some reason (if reason can even be applied here) she then vaulted to the outlandish idea that maternity pay is unfair to those paying tax.
If you’ll excuse the inclination of this English Literature student, let’s unpack Badenoch’s word choice. “Excessive” implies greed. It implies wantonness. It implies, in no uncertain terms, that women who are at home looking after their new-born children are scroungers, undeserving of working people’s oh-so-benevolent charity. It completely ignores the fact that those on maternity leave are part of that workforce, paying taxes, and will return to doing so when they feel able.
Worst of all, it slyly reiterates the tired and derogatory stereotype peddled by some right-wing politicians of the slovenly, burdensome, benefit-leaching single mother.
For context, the Department of Work and Pensions states that a mother is entitled to 39 weeks of ‘paid’ maternity leave. The current rate of maternity pay is set at 90% of a woman’s salary for 6 weeks. After that, you get a flat rate of £183.03 (or 90% of your salary – whichever is lower) a week for 33 weeks, then nothing for a further 13 weeks. That’s one of the lowest rates in Europe – and it has been this way for some time. Therefore, a number of women will have no choice but to return to work as soon as possible, many after just six weeks of leave, as they cannot afford a reduction greater than the 90%. With the emotional and physical toll that birth and new-motherhood can have on a person, that is not very long at all.
Perhaps, instead of going after maternity pay, Badenoch should be talking about making shared parental leave more of a realistic option for modern families. Even I (a 21-year-old non-politician) can tell you that attacking new-mums is probably not the best way to curry favour – or get votes. This is especially true if you are Kemi Badenoch and you’ve constructed your rise through the ranks of your party on the basis of being a champion of ‘real’ (I hope my sarcasm is palpable) women’s rights.
I can’t help but wonder, then: who was Badenoch trying to appeal to? Surely not the women whose rights she was ostensibly protecting as Women and Equalities Minister (by making trans people’s lives as hard as possible)? Because if you wanted to appeal to those women, you would obviously not be questioning their basic rights on national radio.
Badenoch appears to have cottoned on to the fact that none of this went down very well, however, as she has claimed her statement was misrepresented. Considering that interview was conducted in person, where she herself spoke directly into a microphone, that is truly perplexing spin.
Clearly, Conservative Party membership hasn’t therefore seen this for what it is – a politician making desperate grabs at power by spewing whatever unproductive nonsense comes to mind, seeing how it lands, and going from there.
I would like to think that, if it came to it, the UK electorate would see through her ‘saying-the-unsayable’ persona to the truth: Badenoch will attack any group to continue to stoke the fire of her dear ‘culture war’ – a Tory concoction that she is ultimately reliant upon for any foothold in modern politics.
