KEMI Badenoch has defended her claim that the UK is “the best country in the world to be black”.
During a speech at the Conservative Party conference earlier this month, Badenoch said she rejected “critical race theory” and claimed that young black people were being incorrectly told that “British society is against you”.
She said that the Labour Party wanted them to “believe a narrative of hopelessness”.
“A narrative that tells children like mine that the odds are stacked against them,” she added.
“I tell my children this is the best country in the world to be black – because it's a country that sees people, not labels.
"Conservatives want young people to be proud of their country when others want them to be ashamed.
"It wasn't a tough decision for us to reject the divisive agenda of critical race theory.
“We believe, as Martin Luther King once said, people should be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin.”
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph ahead of the G7 Trade Summit in Osaka, Japan, she said she maintains her belief that the UK is as good a place to be black as it is white.
“I think so,” said Badenoch, who was born in London but spent part of her childhood in Nigeria.
“Being an ethnic minority, irrespective of what country you’re in, is challenging and that is just human nature.
“Even in countries where everybody is black, when you have ethnic minorities within them, as I saw within Nigeria, they often face very significant discrimination, more so than the sort of discrimination that I have seen myself in the UK.”
She continued: “I’m not saying that our country is perfect, but I’m saying that our country is better than others in handling differences.
“The message I would say to many of those people who want to portray life in the UK as being so terrible is that if it was so, why is it that people keep coming here?”
She said many of her critics believe she should hold certain views due to her colour and are trying to “silence people like me”.
“As long as there are people like me out there showing what a success the UK is at hosting people from other countries, they are not going to be able to make profit from stoking division, so I make no apologies for that,” she said.
She said she is “not worried at all” by Labour denting the Conservatives’ traditional image as the party of business, saying the opposition “have not done their homework” and “assume the EU is the answer to everything”.
It comes after a poll of more than 10,000 black people in Britain found that less than 50% considered themselves proud to be British while 87% said they expected to receive a substandard level of healthcare because of their race.
During the interview, Badenoch also blasted the BBC’s refusal to call Hamas terrorists.
She said a “false equivalence” has been made in “an attempt to be impartial”.
“Given all of the footage that we saw, we were in no doubt that what we were looking at was a terror attack,” she said. However, Badenoch also defended the UK’s continued dealings with Qatar, which is believed to be housing members of Hamas.
She added: “If you stop doing business with people, if you stop talking to them, then you have less influence and you’re unable to help shape the outcome of events.”
