Kemi Badenoch has dismissed the Liberal Democrats as a party of “foolish ideas” while appearing to acknowledge their advocacy of the interests of local communities.
The Conservative leader was asked to summarise the United Kingdom’s political landscape for an international audience during an interview with Canadian psychologist and DailyWire host Jordan Peterson.
In her reply, Badenoch sought to correct Peterson’s suggestion that Reform UK, lead by Nigel Farage, is the UK’s third party after Labour and the Conservatives.
“The third party in this country is the Liberal Democrats, who have more votes and have fourteen times as many members of parliament as Reform has”, she said.
The Lib Dems, led by Sir Ed Davey, won 12.2 per cent of the vote and 72 seats at the 2024 UK general election. Reform UK won 14.3 per cent of the vote but only five seats.
Badenoch went on to dismiss the Lib Dems as a “protest” vehicle “for mainly people on the left”, despite the gains the party made across several onetime Conservative stronghold constituencies, such as Maidenhead (ex-PM Theresa May’s former seat) and Esther and Walton (ex-deputy PM Dominic Raab’s former seat).
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The Tory leader said: “Now, the Liberal Democrats are basically a protest party for mainly people on the left, and they don’t have much of an ideology other than being nice. They will go with all sorts of extreme things, you know, extreme gender ideology, etc.
“Reform is representing the rage that a lot of people are feeling about things going wrong in the country, but it’s all rage. It’s not courage.”
She added: “And a lot of traditional Labour voters are also going to Reform because they’re angry with their traditional party, and then people who don’t want to have anything to do with it vote Liberal Democrat.”
NEW: Kemi Badenoch acknowledges the existence of the Lib Dems- Considers them a “protest party for mainly people on the left”- "They are not on Twitter, but they are in local communities"- "They will destroy the whole country…"Transcript from DailyWire interview with Jordan Peterson
— Josh Self (@josh-self.bsky.social) 2025-02-19T08:53:20.725Z
Asked by Peterson why the Lib Dems get less coverage “on the international side” than other parties, Badenoch responded that they are “not on Twitter”.
She said: “They are not on Twitter, but they are in local communities. A typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And, you know, the people in the community like them, they are like ‘Fix the church roof, you should be a member of parliament’.
“And they want to be nice. But actually, they’ve got lots of very silly and foolish ideas, along with, you know, being able to fundraise for a local community. And then they have bad views on national security, for example, they don’t want us to keep maybe a nuclear deterrent.”
The Liberal Democrats’ 2024 general election manifesto states that the party supports “maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent with four submarines providing continuous at-sea deterrence, while pursuing multilateral global disarmament.”
Badenoch added: “They have silly ideas about education. They don’t want people to go to prison. They want prisons closed down. Let’s just have restorative justice. You know, people being nice, and if you’re not paying attention, you will think ‘that’s good, these are nice people. We should vote for them’, but actually they will destroy the whole country if you if you let them at it.”
Peterson then asked the Conservative leader if the Lib Dems are distinguishable “ideologically” from the Labour Party.
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Badenoch responded “no”, but went on to note the Lib Dems’ appeal in more rural areas compared to Labour’s urban base.
She said: “You will find Liberal Democrats in a lot of rural constituencies, because they talk about the environment, something that we care about as well, but they talk about it in a way that resonates with people who want to maintain things as they are.
“So Liberal Democrats don’t like building anything. They want everything to stay as it is, which itself appeals to a certain kind of conservative. ‘You know, I don’t want anything to change’, and they will block any kind of thing being developed.”
She added: “And what is interesting is that as politics becomes more volatile, as we have more social media and people retreat into echo chambers of agreement with this, we’re seeing a lot more fragmentation across the board.
“If this was a country where you had proportional representation, it would probably come out in the wash, but we don’t. So you will have a party like Labour, which has won a landslide majority on 34 per cent of the vote. That is a scandal.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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