Tory leader Kemi Badenoch closed the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, England, by scolding Reform UK supporters who treat Englishness as an ethnic as well as a civic identity. The politician she had in mind was Reform lawmaker Suella Braverman, who has said she regards herself as British Indian rather than English, and believes that English people with deep ancestral roots in their country do have a particular identity. The Conservative leader, with the endorsement of Hope Not Hate activist Dan Hodges, railed that she does not want Britain to be “run by people who… debate whether my mixed-race children are English.”

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However, not only is this debate not actually occurring within Reform, but she has previously been aggressively assertive in declaring her own ethnic identity as a Yoruba woman, and as a Nigerian when she was attempting to win Nigerian votes.

Rules for Thee.

Badenoch told her audience, “Reform MPs are openly questioning people’s identity. They are not like us. We are not like them. We are different. We are the Conservative Party.” She added, “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I am black. I am British. I’m proud of my country, I’m proud of our history.”

Braverman, who was born and raised in England by Indian parents, has said she does not regard herself as English, because “Englishness is an ethnicity. There have been English people for centuries, and we need to recognize this more if we are to start taking a more muscular approach to citizenship and nationality. And no, it’s not racist to say this.”

Badenoch, meanwhile, was born in England to a Nigerian mother who traveled to the country just to give birth to her and was taken back to Nigeria shortly afterward, and, despite her conference rhetoric against ethnic identity, she has expressed herself in similar but much harsher terms than Braverman in the past.

In December 2024, she told The Spectator she was tired of being filed as Nigerian, saying, “I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country… those were our ethnic enemies, and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.”

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Opportunistic Identity.

While Badenoch said she had a “very strong identity” as ethnically Yoruba and appeared to reject a broader Nigerian identity, she has also identified as Nigerian when it suits her. On April 16, 2010, standing for election as Kemi Adegoke, she sent supporters a letter headed “Kemi Adegoke for parliament.”

“This year, things are a lot tougher as the party has dropped nationally in the polls. I need your help!” she pleaded. “Nigerians have been fantastic. My immediate circle of friends, ex-school mates, their friends and all our families have really rallied round and have been supportive.”

Ironically, the same letter complained that a BBC caller had insulted her “because I’m Yoruba,” asking readers to back her as a Nigerian. “Like you, I am sick and tired of reading that Nigerians are fraudsters, terrorists, bombing airplanes or slaughtering each other in places like Jos… So I am asking for your help now to support a Nigerian who is trying to improve our national image and do something great here.”

If elected, she wrote, she would speak out against people “cheating and robbing Nigeria and who seek refuge for themselves or their money in the UK,” and publicise “genuine grassroots initiatives such as #lightupNigeria.” She promised updates on her campaign via a “Nigerians for Kemi” list.

Have you seen this before???

When Kemi Badenoch speaks to other Nigerians, she turns off her fake English accent.

She also tells them that she loves Nigeria just as much as England.

And what’s all this about saying Islamic prayers in Nigeria?

She is running to be PM while… pic.twitter.com/thVCrPxblk

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) September 24, 2026

The ‘Golden Ticket.’

Badenoch was among the last to get British citizenship simply as a result of being born on British soil to a foreign national. The British Nationality Act 1981, implemented on January 1, 1983, ended American-style birthright citizenship. Now, a child born in Britain is British if at least one parent is British or settled in Britain. Badenoch has said that finding she held British citizenship was like finding “a Golden Ticket.”

While for liberals like Dan Hodges her denial of an English ethnic identity was a powerful statement against racism, for many right-leaning voters who have turned away from the Conservatives, it is further proof of the party’s turn towards elite, liberal opinion, as well as its hypocrisy, given that Badenoch believes she and other minorities are entitled to an ethnic identity on top of British ones which, for the white population, must remain strictly civic.

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British Conservative Party leader Olukemi “Kemi” Badenoch has claimed that the post-Brexit surge in migration enabled by her party, known as the Boriswave, occurred because government ministers and civil servants simply “didn’t notice” it was happening. However, the Conservatives intentionally loosened immigration controls prior to the Boriswave, with Badenoch personally lobbying to remove certain limits.

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Impossible to Miss.

Speaking at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Birmingham, England, where she was backed by Labour and Hope Not Hate activist Dan Hodges, Badenoch said previous Conservative governments had “promised to lower immigration” and “wanted to lower immigration,” despite the fact that it almost tripled from their entry into government in 2010 to its peak in 2023. The problem, she claimed, was distraction: “There were so many other things that people were looking at and focusing on that actually as the numbers increased, ministers didn’t notice, civil servants didn’t notice until well after huge numbers had come into our country.”

She added that Whitehall and ministers needed to concentrate on “the key items, not every single thing that people may want intervention for.”

However, the claim that the borders were opened accidentally sits awkwardly against the public record of the Conservatives’ deliberate policy choices. Successive Conservative governments cut salary, language, and skills thresholds, abolished a resident labor market test, and opened new visa routes, including expanded health and care pathways and post-study work options. Large visa volumes followed. Between 2021 and 2024, roughly 4.2 million people entered Britain on visas or protection routes. Home Office data showed a record 1.47 million visas issued in the year to March 2023 for work, study, family, or resettlement schemes, and about 1.4 million residence visas granted in calendar year 2022.

Net immigration hit successive peaks well above the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto pledge to bring overall numbers down, and its 2010, 2015, and 2017 promises to reduce net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands.”

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s assessment of the Conservative leader’s claim was blunt: “Kemi Badenoch says the Conservatives let 4 million people into Britain in 4 years because ‘ministers didn’t notice,’” he wrote. “21 of the 27 people in her Shadow Cabinet were those ministers. Her entire team is incompetent and can’t be trusted.”

Kemi Badenoch says the Conservatives let 4 million people into Britain in 4 years because “ministers didn’t notice.”

21 of the 27 people in her Shadow Cabinet were those ministers.

Her entire team is incompetent and can't be trusted. pic.twitter.com/ntRycZhLqX

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) October 6, 2026

Kemi Was Complicit.

Badenoch was an active participant in dismantling immigration restrictions. On December 19th, 2018, as a Conservative MP and party vice chairwoman, she welcomed then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s immigration white paper loosening controls in the House of Commons. “As a first-generation immigrant, I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement,” she said. “I feel that the white paper represents a move from the 20th century to a much better future immigration system. I especially thank the Home Secretary for removing the annual limits on work visas and on international students: I lobbied for both on behalf of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Anglia Ruskin University, which serve my constituency.”

A large share of Badenoch’s current Shadow Cabinet did serve as ministers during the years when visa grants and net migration climbed to record levels. Farage’s count—that 21 of 27 were among those ministers—underscores the continuity. Badenoch herself sat in Cabinet for part of the period. An explanation for Conservative-era mass migration that rests on claims that they “didn’t notice” it was happening asks voters to treat a multi-year policy outcome, visible in quarterly Home Office statistics and repeatedly debated in Parliament, as a mere accident rather than a deliberate breach of election promises.

Kemi Badenoch campaigned to have the annual cap on immigrant work visas lifted.

She claimed it would support businesses. This was 2018, when immigration was already too high and destroying GDP per capita, as well as against the Tory manifesto pledge to lower immigration.

She… https://t.co/XpoVscH1DG pic.twitter.com/QNPS6hq7Wo

— Alex Armstrong (@Alexarmstrong) March 10, 2025

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A 15-year-old boy was woken up in the morning hours two months ago by British police and placed under arrest. His crime was not plotting a terror attack, committing a violent or sexual crime. Instead, the Reform UK party activist and supporter of Nigel Farage was raided by police for an increasingly common reason for such raids: he had mocked an establishment politician on social media.

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The teen, named Fraser, told British media this week that he had been arrested during the summer holidays after helping campaign for Nigel Farage during his by-election (special election) campaign in Clacton. In a post on Facebook, he insulted a local Conservative Party councilor, Simon Bennett from Wolverhampton, calling him a “rent boy,” a British term for a young male prostitute. That was enough to have four police officers show up at his home on August 3 and arrest him.

The case, which is still ongoing, is just the latest example of what has been popularly referred to as two-tier policing and two-tier justice in Britain, where it appears that primarily white, right-leaning members of the public are not only being arrested for speech offenses but are being sentenced more harshly than some migrants are for violent crimes or sex offenses against children.

Britain is Arresting Thousands for Online Speech.

Arrests for online speech offenses in Britain are among the highest in the world, with a Big Brother Watch investigation published this year showing that between 2021 and 2025 alone, 62,199 people were arrested for “communications offenses.” The numbers would average 34 arrests per day, and because the information is only from 38 of 45 police forces, the actual number could be as high as 75,000 arrests.

Britain has a multitude of laws against criminal speech, including the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023. The latter was passed in the name of protecting children online, but has been used repeatedly against right-wing activists and protestors. One passage even makes it illegal to publish “disinformation” online.

Contrast the numbers for Russia, an undeniably authoritarian country. A 2024 report suggests that Russia launched 30,000 cases over social media posts from 2010 to 2024, with just 1,200 considered criminal offenses. That means Russia had fewer than half of the overall cases over a period more than ten years longer than Britain.

Britain has also had police visit people’s homes over “non-crime hate incidents,” defined as speech that may have offended someone but was never considered an actual crime. In March of this year, the leftist Labour Party government scrapped the policing of non-crime hate incidents, calling them “petty squabbles” and acknowledging they were a waste of police time and resources.

Two-Tier Policing and Two-Tier Justice.

The term “two-tier policing” became popularised after the Southport mass stabbing in which Axel Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan asylum seekers, stabbed several young girls to death at a dance class, shocking the British nation. In response, many took to the streets not only to protest the incident itself but also to protest mass migration in general.

Some of the protests turned violent, but some of those prosecuted for disorder merely shouted at officers or were arrested for simply being present at protests. A total of 912 people, including children, were prosecuted in connection with the protests, with the government bringing an additional 500 prison places online just to accommodate them. One of those imprisoned, 61-year-old Pete Lynch, ended his own life after being sentenced for protesting in Rotherham, a notorious hotspot for Pakistani rape gang activity. He had been sentenced to two years and eight months.

Other protesters faced similar sentences, including a man who yelled “Who the f**k is Allah?” who was given a sentence of two years and six months. His crime involved no physical violence.

One of the most high-profile cases involved a woman who was not even physically at any protests. Lucy Connolly was prosecuted for a social media post in which she stated, “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.” After pleading guilty, she was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison.

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Real Criminals Get Soft Sentences.

When dealing with serious crimes like sexual assault or other acts of violence, the British judicial system is notoriously lenient, especially if the perpetrator is a migrant or comes from a migrant background. In September of last year, Moffat Konofilia, 48, was given a mere 18-month community order and 60 hours of unpaid work for sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl. Konofilia, an illegal immigrant, had been living on a barge among around 500 other asylum seekers.

In Epping, an Ethiopian illegal migrant claiming asylum named Hadush Kebatu was arrested for sexually abusing a schoolgirl and a woman. This led to protests outside the hotel that had housed him and other asylum seekers by locals and others, with some violence among the participants. Two of the protestors, Jonathan Glover and Charlie Land, were sentenced to 30 months and 32 months, respectively, in August 2026 for their roles in the disorder.

Kebatu, meanwhile, after being found guilty of two sexual assaults, one involving a 14-year-old, received just 12 months in prison. This means the migrant predator was given a sentence less than half of that imposed on the people who protested his crimes. Added to that, Ketabu was released early by mistake by incompetent officials, who had to launch a manhunt to find him again just a month after his initial imprisonment.

Henry Nowak: The Clearest Case of Two-Tier Policing.

White British teenager Henry Nowak was killed late last year while coming home from an evening with his friends at a local pub in Southampton. The 18-year-old was confronted by a Sikh named Vikrum Digwa, who stabbed Nowak repeatedly with a religious dagger he was allowed to openly carry despite British knife laws, due to exemptions for his faith.

Later released bodycam footage showed that police treated Nowak as the attacker after Digwa and his family lied to them, falsely claiming that Nowak was drunk and had racially abused them. Instead of examining Nowak, who pleaded for help and said he had been stabbed, one officer stated, “I don’t think you have mate,” and roughly handcuffed him, while he bled to death on the ground. The family had not only lied to the police, but Digwa’s mother had even hidden the knife used to kill Nowak before the police arrived.

The incident outraged the British public, who saw police arresting Nowak and letting him die because they believed Digwa’s accusation of racism unquestioningly, and treated Nowak saying he had been stabbed as less serious. Most argued that the reason for the unequal treatment was that Nowak was white. Accusations of two-tier policing for white Britons in the wake of the case were supported by Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, who released a video addressing the case and calling for an end to two-tier policing.

WARNING: Incredibly distressing footage.

The bodycam footage has finally been released of Henry Nowak’s last moments.

He was the victim, but treated like a criminal.

“I can’t breathe” he says, over and over again.

Instead of helping him the police arrest him on false charges of racism.

Harrowing.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion he was treated differently because he was white.

— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) June 1, 2026

Britain Has a Priorities Problem.

While the British Parliament claims that two-tier policing does not exist, case after case from the Southport and Epping protests to Henry Nowak’s wrongful arrest as he was dying show that those who are white or regarded as right-wing by the authorities are the subject of aggressive police action and harsh prison sentences, while serious criminals are released early on the grounds that prisons are too crowded.

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Image by James Mitchell.

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The National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam explained to Andrew Kolvet on The Charlie Kirk Show this week that the riots now gripping France are being driven predominantly by people from migrant backgrounds, and that the governments which brought them into Europe are not merely feckless bystanders but active participants in a modern slave trade.

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“These… riots that have now been taking place for about a week, predominantly with what [the French authorities] call ‘migrant-background individuals,’” Kassam said. The phrase, he argued, is “just a sort of euphemistic way to say migrants, maybe illegal migrants. Almost always in such cases, [it is] people who have entered into the country unlawfully, even though they may currently have legal status thanks to French government policies.”

The protests began as school blockades over conditions in French high schools and have since escalated into arson attacks, clashes with police, and hundreds of injuries on both sides. French officials have pointed to far-left involvement, including from French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise party, while images from cities including Paris, Lyon, and the European Union power center of Strasbourg have shown barricades, fires, and running confrontations.

President Donald J. Trump has described the scenes as a consequence of “nothing less than out of control mass migration.”

KASSAM: EUROPE IS FACING A ‘MODERN-DAY SLAVE TRADE’@RaheemKassam argues criminal trafficking networks are exploiting migrants—and accuses European governments of enabling the system.

“These are criminal gangs. They are mass human trafficking organizations.@AndrewKolvet pic.twitter.com/3OkbtVsTPK

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) October 5, 2026

Modern-Day Slave Trade.

“These are people who, remember, did not come to Europe, did not get there of their own volition, but were brought to Europe by the likes of [former German Chancellor] Angela Merkel in 2015, when she said, ‘Everybody, come one, come all. We can do this. You’re all doctors and nurses and engineers and scientists and nuclear physicists from Angola, and we’d love to have you,’” Kassam stressed.

He extended the same charge to the aid groups that help ferry people across the Mediterranean and the English Channel, which are now facing sharper scrutiny in Britain amid protests on the south coast. “Fundamentally, what do we have here? We have a modern-day slave trade,” Kassam said. “These people are coming over and effectively entering into indentured servitude to the people who they paid to bring them over. These are criminal gangs. They are mass human-trafficking organizations.”

He named the complicit politicians directly: “Andy Burnham in the United Kingdom and Emmanuel Macron are actually traffickers themselves.”

The warning Kassam attached to the French scenes was that the same populations and these trafficking networks do not stop at the Channel. “I’m afraid those people will get to England as well, and that is why the big sort of protests are kicking off here on our south coast, because they’re looking at places like Paris, because they’re looking at northern France, because they’re looking at other parts of the continent,” he explained.

Kassam argues that the riots are less a spontaneous education dispute than the predictable result of a policy that imported large numbers of people through criminal intermediaries, regularized them after the fact, and then treated the resulting disorder as inexplicable. The governments that opened the route, he argues, are culpable for the trafficking.

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Brazil’s political establishment succeeded in keeping former President Jair Bolsonaro, a major ally of President Donald J. Trump, off the ballot in 2026. It did not succeed in killing Bolsonarismo, the right-wing populist movement he inspired. In Sunday’s first round of Brazil’s presidential election, Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, finished ahead of incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, setting up a decisive runoff on October 25.

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According to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Flávio received 56.1 million votes, or 47.03 percent, compared with 53.9 million, or 45.16 percent, for Lula. Despite years of prosecutions, court orders, political bans, and the imprisonment of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist right may be closer than ever to returning to power.

They Removed Bolsonaro, But Not Bolsonarismo.

Jair Bolsonaro’s fall from power following his razor-thin defeat to Lula in 2022 was followed by a series of legal battles. Brazil’s electoral authorities barred the former president from running for office until 2030, and prosecutors subsequently accused him of participating in a plot to overturn the result of the 2022 election. In September 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro and sentenced him to more than 27 years in prison.

Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing, while his allies have portrayed the cases against him as a politically motivated attempt to remove the most powerful figure on the Brazilian right. President Donald J. Trump’s administration explicitly accused Brazilian authorities of “persecuting former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro” in a July 2025 executive order. The White House described the criminal charges against Bolsonaro as unjustified and warned that the prosecution threatened Brazil’s ability to hold a free and fair presidential election in 2026.

The irony now confronting Lula and Bolsonaro’s opponents is difficult to miss: they succeeded in preventing Jair Bolsonaro from running, only to find themselves facing another Bolsonaro who received more votes than Lula in the first round.

Trump Went to Bat for Bolsonaro.

The similarities between Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump have been apparent since Bolsonaro entered Brazil’s presidential palace in 2019. Both built populist movements around nationalism, opposition to the political establishment, tougher policies on crime and immigration, hostility toward socialism, conservative social values, and an often combative relationship with the mainstream media.

But the relationship became considerably more important after Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

The Trump administration repeatedly attacked the treatment of Bolsonaro and focused particular attention on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who became one of the central figures in the investigations of Bolsonaro and his supporters. The administration accused Moraes of abusing his authority, censoring political speech, targeting political opponents, and placing unacceptable demands on American technology companies.

Trump eventually transformed those objections into American foreign policy. In July 2025, the White House announced an additional 40 percent tariff on Brazilian goods, bringing tariffs on affected products to 50 percent. The administration specifically cited what it described as the “politically motivated persecution, intimidation, harassment, censorship, and prosecution” of Bolsonaro and his supporters.

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Bolsonaro Becomes a Dynasty.

The 2026 election has also demonstrated that Bolsonarismo is no longer dependent entirely upon its founder. Flávio’s presidential campaign has been accompanied by remarkable electoral success for the rest of the Bolsonaro family. Former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro won a Senate seat representing the Federal District, while Jair’s son Carlos Bolsonaro won a Senate seat in Santa Catarina. Jair Renan Bolsonaro was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, as was Renato Bolsonaro, Jair’s brother. The family emerged from Sunday’s elections with four new members of Congress while Flávio advanced to the presidential runoff.

The results for Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party were even more consequential. The party increased its representation from 15 to 28 senators, the strongest Senate result for a single party since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985, and was projected to win 121 seats in the lower house.

Latin America Is Moving Right.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s success is also part of a much broader political transformation underway across Latin America. The early 2020s were dominated by leftist political victories. Lula returned to power in Brazil, Gabriel Boric won in Chile, Gustavo Petro captured Colombia, and left-wing governments appeared ascendant throughout much of Central and South America. That political map has changed dramatically.

Argentina elected libertarian Javier Milei in 2023. Ecuador reelected center-right President Daniel Noboa in 2025. Bolivia subsequently shifted right after two decades dominated by the Movement for Socialism, while conservative José Antonio Kast won Chile’s presidency. Honduras and Costa Rica also moved right, followed by major conservative victories in Peru and Colombia during 2026.

With more than 200 million people and Latin America’s largest economy, a Flávio Bolsonaro victory in Brazil would place the region’s dominant country alongside an increasingly powerful bloc of governments hostile to the socialist and progressive movements that dominated regional politics only a few years ago.

The USAID Factor.

The Trump administration moved rapidly in 2025 to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), terminating thousands of foreign aid awards and transferring the remnants of American foreign assistance to tighter State Department control. The move dramatically reduced the vast network of grants that had previously financed nongovernmental organizations, civil society groups, media initiatives, and other programs throughout Latin America.

Since Trump’s overhaul of USAID and American foreign policy, Latin American voters have delivered a remarkable succession of defeats to left-wing candidates and governments.

The shift has removed a major component of the U.S.-funded NGO and civil-society ecosystem that conservatives had long accused of disproportionately empowering progressive organizations abroad. At the same time, Trump has openly cultivated friendly governments in the Western Hemisphere and made rolling back socialism in the Americas a central feature of his regional strategy.

The Bolsonaros Bounce Back.

Flávio Bolsonaro enters the October 25 runoff in a position few predicted. He not only finished first, but did so while his father remained imprisoned and prohibited from running himself.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian right has dramatically strengthened its position in Congress. Even another Lula victory could therefore leave the veteran leftist confronting a legislature far more sympathetic to Bolsonaro, including lawmakers who may attempt to secure an amnesty for the former president.

The Brazilian political and judicial establishment spent years attempting to contain Jair Bolsonaro, ultimately barring him from office and putting him behind bars. Yet the movement he created survived, his family expanded its political power, and more than 56 million Brazilians just cast presidential ballots for his son.

If Flávio Bolsonaro defeats Lula on October 25, the attempt to remove the Bolsonaro name from the presidential palace will have produced an extraordinary outcome: another Bolsonaro in power, a vastly strengthened Bolsonaro political dynasty, and the biggest Latin American country joining the region’s growing revolt against the left.

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