Watch Kemi’s speech on how integration is vital to Britain’s success 👇:
Read Kemi's speech in full below 👇
Thank you so much for giving me another opportunity at the Policy Exchange.
I am afraid this is going to be one of my longer speeches because I have quite a lot to say.
Last night, after more than 24 hours of obfuscation, Keir Starmer finally agreed to support the US and Israel’s action in Iran.
Canada and Australia had already backed our allies on Saturday.
But until last night, Keir Starmer still could not tell the British people where our country stood, or even whether the UK would allow the use of our airbases.
It took Iranian missiles hitting allies in the Middle East, and threatening tens of thousands of British nationals across the Gulf, before the Prime Minister finally climbed off the fence.
Iran’s regime has funded international terrorism, attacked British nationals, brutally repressed its own citizens, and continues to try to develop a nuclear weapon.
And yet even this morning, the Foreign Secretary still cannot say whether the Labour government supports action against Iran.
People in Britain will be wondering why our country’s response has been so weak.
The official explanation for the hesitancy is international law.
But this is a fig leaf.
The real explanation is not legal.
It is political.
Across the UK, there are groups whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with the British national interest.
These are people whom Labour see as ‘their voters’ because without them they cannot stay in power.
This is not ‘international law’ or principle.
It is pure, partisan, political calculation from a party that has surrendered its right to govern our country, and it is the reality of decades of failed integration policy.
Britain’s interests, both economically and militarily, are being put under threat by rising separatism in this country.
A separatism that we saw on full display in the by-election last week.
I want to talk today about the real lesson from Gorton and Denton.
Much of the commentary in the days since has fixated on this issue of “family voting”.
Yes, our voting laws must be upheld, but I do not believe that all those women marched into polling booths to support Hannah Spencer because that was not what they wanted to do.
I am afraid they did not want to vote Conservative either, just as they have not for 80 years.
By fixating on family voting, we risk learning the wrong lesson from what happened in this by-election.
Just as we did in Batley and Spen in 2021.
Something else is happening.
Something much deeper and much more disturbing.
What those by-elections had in common was campaigning designed to mobilise voters on ethnicity and religion, not domestic priorities.
People were voting not based on who will increase their wages or fix their schools, but on who will protect the interests of their identity groups and punish those they disagree with.
This is not healthy and it is not British.
It is appalling that separatist campaigning was carried out in Urdu by the Green Party.
Campaigning with different messages in a foreign language is a deliberate ploy to exclude those who do not speak that language.
It is not in the service of integration.
It is about cynically driving a wedge between groups to make it easier to harvest ethnic votes.
And the rise of separatism in Britain is making it easier for this style of campaigning to work.
Some people do not think separatism is a problem.
Others are scared to talk about it because they worry about looking “divisive”.
I say to those people that we must tackle this, we need to be bold and we need to be brave.
But we also need to do it with the right tone.
Anyone can throw a match and walk away, but the point of this is not to divide or provoke.
It is the opposite.
It is about bringing people in Britain together around a common culture and identity.
There is a vacuum of competence right now on this issue.
That is why Conservatives have to lead.
No one else can or will do this properly.
We have to.
My speech today is an answer to a complex question.
Why are we seeing more separatism, why have previous solutions not worked, and how do we fix it?
Separatism is on the rise in our country because, for too long, Britain has been complacent about our culture and too tolerant of those weaponising identity politics for their own gain.
I want to be very clear that I am talking here about separatism, not sectarianism.
Separatism is a way of living that keeps a group apart from the wider society.
People who say, “We live here, but we do not join in.”
People who see Britain as a place to use, not a country to belong to.
This is what I mean when I say, “Our country is our home, not a hotel.”
Sectarianism is a symptom of separatism.
It is the politics that follows when people are taught to think as blocs.
“Vote for us because you are one of us.”
Previous governments have failed to deal with sectarianism because they did not address its root cause, separatism.
The consequences of these failures are clear.
The rape gangs scandal is the ugliest example.
Abuse of children on an industrial scale.
Criminals left unchallenged for decades because authorities feared being called racist or losing votes more than they feared failing victims.
A lot of political attention in recent years has been focused on immigration or Islamist extremism.
Both matter.
But if you do not deal with the separatism that allows extremism to grow, then you do not address the root cause.
Extremists thrive where separatism has already done the groundwork, where dissenters have nowhere outside of their community to turn.
Separatism is most visible in some Muslim communities, with Islamist extremism its most violent expression.
But we are also seeing a rise of separatism in other communities, intimidation tactics in our politics, and attacks like the one we saw on the Indian High Commission in March 2023 by Sikh separatists.
A lot of diaspora politics in Britain is just imported conflict, and when overseas grievances are imported, they produce separatist activism here.
The reason our frameworks for dealing with extremism and terrorism have often failed is because they are not dealing with separatism and a failure of integration.
Not enough work has been done on a positive, constructive alternative for people living in closed communities, who have little option but to agree with, or defend, the status quo.
That is what I want to fix.
I was struck by the results of a focus group of Muslim voters published last week.
It showed that many of them do not see a positive case for integration and in fact see separatism as normal.
One of them described the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, as “forgetting where she came from”.
This shows the scale of opposition many minorities face when they do the right thing and try to join the mainstream.
If a Home Secretary is being spoken of like that, imagine what the children are having to deal with.
We need to provide a framework that protects them and backs them up.
The most important question to ask is who is really losing from this.
The biggest victims are the people trapped inside separatism.
Children growing up here in England but fenced off from the full life of this country.
Women blocked from work, from independence, and from building a life of their own.
Girls treated as adults far too young, with rules of “modesty” imposed on their clothing even in their school uniforms.
Then treated like children when they are pressured into marriages they did not choose, sometimes to someone they have never met, sometimes even from another country, because that is the done thing.
This is the reality that Labour, the Green Party and others who pander to separatism pretend not to see.
They call it community.
I call it coercion.
Then there are the victims who should have been protected, like during the rape gangs scandal.
Victims like the teacher who was forced to go into hiding after showing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson.
Increasingly, the victims are Jews.
They are threatened and attacked, and their homes and businesses are vandalised.
Their restaurants and even their primary schools need security guards.
Two Jewish worshippers were murdered at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester during Yom Kippur.
Just last month in Brighton and in Sheffield, activists went door to door urging boycotts of Israeli goods.
Let us be honest about what that is, a political movement turning up on your doorstep, demanding you prove you are on the “right” side and recording those who do not comply.
This is intimidation, pure and simple.
And what did the local Green MP have to say about it.
That the campaigners were “well intentioned”.
This is normalising the targeting of Jews in their own neighbourhoods just to pick up votes.
Shameful.
And no other party seems to care about this except the Conservatives.
We care because we believe in a united country.
A Britain that feels recognisable wherever you are, not just a collection of tribes.
I have long argued that while Britain is a multi-racial country, we must not be a multi-cultural one.
Some people think this is a controversial position because they do not understand what culture is.
Culture is not your skin colour.
It is not just the food you eat, or the clothes you wear for a festival.
Culture is much deeper than that.
It is behaviours.
It is norms.
It is expectations.
Expectations about the role of women, about children and the freedoms they are allowed as they grow.
It is attitudes to authority, who gets which jobs and how.
Concepts of fairness.
Notions of tolerance, free speech and definitions of what is sacred.
That is what culture is.
We must tackle this ludicrous idea that culture means something that comes from somewhere else.
Which leads to children being sent home for wearing a Union Jack outfit as their choice on culture day.
Basically telling that child that there is no such thing as English or British culture and that the only good things about our country are imported.
This is rubbish.
I understand what culture is because I grew up in a genuinely multicultural society where everyone looked the same, yet norms, behaviours, languages and even ways of practising the same religion were quite different.
British culture exists.
We live in it.
We benefit from it and we have a duty to defend it and pass it on.
The answer to this is integration.
But for integration to work, people have to know what they are integrating into.
A culture which is strong and self-confident.
It does not work if Britain is a mess of competing cultures and it cannot work if we are not brave enough to say who we are and what we expect.
Integration can only work when people come at a pace and in numbers that can be easily absorbed.
That is why last year we toughened up our immigration policy.
And let me be honest, I do not think even integration is the real objective.
Assimilation is.
This should be common sense.
If you join a country, you join the country.
You do not create your own separate thing.
Tolerance is an important part of any decent society.
But tolerating minority communities does not mean that we want people living in tribes.
What we want is assimilation, one society with shared norms under the same laws.
Instead of asking newcomers to join our way of life, too many people in authority decided integration was a “two-way street”.
This is what creates the space for separatism, with endless arguments about halal meat and whether or not we should ban burqas.
The fact is, if authorities cannot enforce the law on family voting in Gorton, I can assure you they are not going to be ripping niqabs or burqas off women’s faces or putting them in prison.
Banning burqas in France has not improved integration.
I want to see the end of women covering their faces in this country, and what I am talking about today will show how we do it.
Once upon a time we talked about British values of tolerance and live and let live, muscular liberalism.
Over the years, this has drifted into something weaker, tolerance without confidence and principles without enforcement.
I am afraid muscular liberalism is no longer enough.
We must never undersell the value of liberty and freedom.
They are necessary for our society to flourish.
However, freedom without clarity on boundaries, or clarity on what needed protecting, bred a slow normalisation of separatism.
It resulted in double standards and parallel norms until the country started to feel like it was running a two-tier system with different rules for different people.
What we need is muscular conservatism.
Muscular conservatism starts from a simple truth.
We do not want to throw away any of the things that are good about our society.
We want to keep them, defend them and pass them on.
That means having the courage to set boundaries.
It means being willing to enforce standards and not be embarrassed by doing so.
That is what muscular conservatism looks like in practice, we conserve.
We keep the things that make this country work, the rule of law, equal citizenship, free speech and personal responsibility.
We draw limits to protect what we cherish.
For many years, I cherished the fact that this was a country where antisemitism was rare.
But because of our tolerance of attitudes that do not align with British values, we have lost this.
In theory, this country still believes in free speech.
But without enforcing limits, equal standards and equal rights, we tolerated marches intimidating Jews across our cities.
For too long, integration has been managerial rather than moral.
And let me tell you what I mean by that.
It is when governments announce strategies, more consultation and new grants for “community projects”, but show no willingness to say what newcomers are joining or what the civic norms actually are.
Muscular conservatism is the end of that drift.
We are not just a collection of individuals doing whatever we like until someone complains.
We are more than that.
A society is a set of shared norms, enforced fairly and passed on deliberately.
This requires clear principles, a clear diagnosis and the nerve to act.
It means refusing to be cowed into silence.
And it means delivery.
Relentless, practical delivery of a plan.
So today, I am announcing our plans to deal with separatism, culture and integration.
It starts with a new Cultural and Integration Commission, which I am tasking with preparing an interim report by the time of our party conference in October.
From that, we will create an Integration and Cohesion Plan that sets out the culture that we want people to assimilate into.
What we expect and what we will enforce.
First, we must do away with what has failed.
Integration being treated as an administrative process has not worked.
That era is over.
We will act on a simple doctrine.
We will end identity politics in the state, full stop.
No racial preferences.
Protected characteristics will not be used as criteria for hiring, promotion, admissions or procurement.
There will be no more state-sponsored division.
From now on, every public body will act based on merit and competence, not grievance and quotas.
I will ask the Commission to investigate how we ensure that integration is a duty where Britain sets the terms.
Newcomers should join our country, not try to change it.
And we will back the people who enforce standards.
School leaders, police officers, NHS staff and employers.
The people who are currently left to take the risk on their own.
That is not fair.
They need us and we will stand up for them.
That was the first thing.
The second is universalism.
That is one set of rules for everyone, enforced fairly and visibly.
No more two-tier.
Our institutions will model those terms and enforce them.
Universalism will run through every aspect of government policy, from education to policing, welfare to immigration.
We will review every single code of practice to ensure standardisation across public bodies and prevent them from doing their own thing.
This strand of work will be carried out by the Shadow Cabinet Office team.
We will replace the promotion of multiculturalism in schools with a national story and civic confidence.
Our curriculum should tell a coherent national story.
One that is inclusive of the many people who have come to Britain, but without the grievance or guilt which is corroding our cultural confidence.
We will not teach our children that “all cultures are equal”.
Instead, we will teach them why Britain’s civic culture matters.
I have already commissioned Professor Robert Tombs and Baroness Amanda Spielman to begin this work with the Shadow Education Team.
We will protect free speech and back people who uphold common standards.
That is necessary.
That is the fourth principle.
Teachers, lecturers, public servants and employers must be able to state basic facts, teach a coherent national story and uphold standards without being intimidated into silence as we saw in Batley.
We let that teacher down.
Never again.
A free society cannot be run by whoever is most aggressive, violent, shouts loudest and pushes hardest.
So we will end the institutional self-censorship that stops people from doing the right thing.
I have asked Lord Toby Young to lead a review of this work.
The fifth thing is that I will ask the Commission to work out how we can fundamentally overhaul the Equality Act so that it prioritises meritocracy and strengthens integration.
It will look at how we introduce a Meritocracy Test so that we make sure that anti-discrimination is not used as a mechanism to undermine meritocracy and to align incentives so integration and assimilation become the path of least resistance.
This work will be led by Claire Coutinho.
Alongside this, I am commissioning work on Islamist extremism and how it feeds on separatism so we tackle both the ideology and the conditions that let it grow.
This is being led by Shadow Cabinet Ministers Chris Philp and Nick Timothy, and supported by former Prison Governor Ian Acheson.
This is a lot of work and this is just the beginning.
Because this is not just about culture.
It is about growth, trust and the cost of running a country, so there will be an economic thread running throughout this work because integration affects our economic growth.
The fact is that assimilated migrants contribute more, and barriers to participation in society mirror barriers to participation in the workplace.
They are barriers to lifetime earnings and barriers to tax contributions.
We cannot fix integration without breaking cycles of dependency where communities become net recipients generation after generation.
Integration and social cohesion are not a “nice to have”.
They are part of our economic infrastructure.
In a high-trust society, business is easier, investment is safer and growth comes faster.
In a low-trust society, everything costs more.
Regulation, monitoring, litigation and the sheer friction.
We are paying a “trust tax”.
Integration is part of our plan to get Britain working again.
The old way of doing things no longer works.
That is why we need something new.
And only the Conservatives can provide this.
We are a new party now.
I have had a lifetime to think about this.
I have lived the alternative.
I grew up in a society where people looked the same but lived by different rules.
I left it behind for a reason.
I chose Britain because it is a country where the law is applied equally, whether you are a prince or a pauper.
This is a country where merit matters and where you can build a life without asking permission from gatekeepers.
We are a multi-racial country, proudly so.
That is the real legacy of Empire.
But a multi-racial country only works if we are honest about what holds us together and serious about defending it.
And yes, this means saying something unfashionable.
Identity politics is a dead end, whether it comes from the Left or the Right.
If you want politics that is organised around grievance and group pressure, there are plenty of other parties offering that.
But we can see where that leads today with a Prime Minister too scared to take action to defend our country until after we are attacked.
If you want a country that holds together, there is only one party that is offering that.
The Conservatives.
As long as I am leading this party, we will do the hard work.
We will defend the rules that make Britain fair.
We will back the people who enforce standards.
We will restore confidence in our institutions and pride in our country.
We will fix what is broken and preserve the beliefs and values which put the “Great” into “Great Britain”.
