As Americans focused their attention on their own ballot boxes, a quieter—yet significant—election across the pond may have slipped their notice. On November 2, Kemi Badenoch, a Nigerian-British woman with a feisty reputation and strong “anti-woke” rhetoric, was elected leader of the Conservative party. Badenoch begins her tenure at the head of the 190-year-old party at a fraught crossroads. Following their brutal electoral loss in July, the Conservatives must choose the future of the British right, a choice that could have repercussions across the West. Will they rediscover their traditional values, or will they abandon them forever?
The Conservatives didn’t lose to Keir Starmer’s Labour party so much as they were punished for their abject failure to live up to the “conservative” name. For fourteen years, the party presided over a “woke” march through the institutions. With a new rival, the Reform U.K. party, offering a right-wing alternative on the political stage, the Tories hemorrhaged votes from disappointed constituents, splitting the right-wing political spectrum and handing victory to the left.
While in Number 10, the party’s progressives held the reins. Forming a new “Godless” right, they abhorred the “outdated” notion of a nuclear family, instead preferring to champion individual freedoms. The government attacked the societal institutions that have historically done the most to serve the vulnerable, including the Church.
For centuries, the Church was responsible for hospitals, schools, and care for the poor. Even in modern times, where so much ground has been ceded to the state, the Church offers a cure to our nation’s pandemic of loneliness. One in three households in the U.K. are single-occupant. More than half of people over fifty experience loneliness most of or all the time. Religious communities offer comfort and a sense of belonging to the lonely and adrift.
Yet the government has undermined Christianity time and again. The Tories dismissed the right to worship during the pandemic by keeping church doors closed for longer than necessary. And they installed a series of public order laws that demonized and criminalized Christian expression—including, infamously, praying in the privacy of one’s own mind.
They also targeted another foundational social institution: marriage. According to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, marriage contributes more to one’s happiness than earning a big salary, and married people report higher life satisfaction than singles or cohabiting couples. Children who live with married parents have better mental health. Fathers in the home are one of the strongest safeguards against adolescent poverty and crime. Married women are less likely to be victims of violent crime. Married men are less likely to perpetrate violent crimes.
Yet the past two decades of progressive rule have allowed the family to be pulled apart. Nothing has been done to stall or reverse the plummeting marriage rate, with the tax system offering almost no benefits to those who wed. On the contrary, no-fault divorce was introduced under Tory rule in 2022.
Parenthood has suffered too. While our birth rate plummets—now the lowest ever on record—progressives have only worsened the decline. Current maternity policies pressure women to return to the workplace as soon as possible after birth. Fifty percent of women don’t have children before the age of thirty—some out of choice, yet many because today’s social circumstances simply don’t allow for it.
As marriage, faith, and family crumble in neglect, the results are tragic. More than 130,000 British fathers have no contact at all with their children, fueling poor mental health and a growing gang culture in our next generation. One in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Our welfare structures groan under the weight of an aging population with no family support. Last year, nine thousand people died alone and weren’t found until at least a week later.
Where Church and family support has been destroyed, the state has had to expand. The London School of Economics estimates that our mental health crisis costs the U.K. economy at least £118 billion a year. One in five general practitioner appointments are now taken up by people who are lonely or seeking life advice. As crime soars due to fatherlessness, state-funded social workers, police officers, prison services, and more are in high demand.
Starmer’s Labour government has signaled no intention to champion faith, marriage, or family. And when it comes to these core societal pillars, Badenoch’s record is mixed. She fought bravely for Parliament to acknowledge biological reality, including by keeping males out of women’s bathrooms. At the very least, we can applaud her for being “anti-woke”—but is that enough?
When it comes to family policy, her comments have raised some concerns. Instead of championing greater support for mothers in the face of the birth crisis, she claimed that current maternity leave benefits in the U.K. go “too far.” And in a document detailing her leadership bid, she insinuated that those who believe in traditional marriage or “disapprove” of cohabitation are backward “conspiracy theorists.”
It’s important to stand against wokery, as Badenoch likely will. But that alone won’t heal a nation of broken families. Badenoch has a chance to make a fresh start amid a mess her party helped create. But in order to do so she must reject directionless liberalism and embrace the conservative values that lay the foundation of this nation. A Conservative party that supports faith, family, and community has a future. A country that lacks these structures can only come to ruin.
Lois McLatchie Miller is a senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) U.K.
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Image provided by Olukemi Badenoch ©House of Commons/Roger Harris, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
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