Kemi Badenoch Refuses To Condemn Elon Musk's Call For Far-Right To 'Fight Back Or Die'

Kemi Badenoch has refused to condemn Elon Musk over his call for the far-right in Britain to “fight back or die”.

The Conservative leader also side-stepped questions over whether or not Tommy Robinson – the former member of British National Party also known as Stephen Yaxley Lennon – is “far-right”.

It comes after Robinson led more than 100,000 people on a supposed “free speech” march through London at the weekend.

Musk made an appearance via video link during the rally, claiming “violence is coming to the UK”, and urging attendees to “fight back or die”.

So Badenoch was asked about the protest by a member of the public during an LBC phone-in last night, and questioned over what she is “doing to stop the far-right extremism that’s spreading through the UK right now”.

Badenoch said there is a lot of “uncertainty” in the UK right now, adding: “When you get a lot of people together in London like that, there will inevitably be problems.”

She added: “Let’s not give people a particular label just because Tommy Robinson was there.”

When LBC presenter Iain Dale asked if she would call Robinson “far-right”, Badenoch refused to say, simply adding: “I’m not interested in giving labels to people.”

She said: “The first thing we should do is stop trying to label people who have different opinions to us.”

She also claimed politicians need to address it when people experience loss of cultural identity with “reasonable rhetoric” not “escalating violence”.

Dale asked if she would have felt safe walking through the protests at the weekend, she said: “There were all sorts of people there, it was a majority white crowd but there were Black people there who were saying the same thing.”

She added: “We are the least racist country in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

The presenter then reminded Badenoch that Musk had incited violence at the rally, to which she replied: “You look at the comments he made, and it’s very easy to read it in multiple contexts. What I don’t want to be doing is condemning this person, condemning that person – we’ve been doing that for many years.”

“He was inciting violence, Kemi,” Dale reminded her.

“I don’t think he actually was,” Badenoch said. “He was saying people are being violent, fight back –”

“Fight back or die?” Dale said.

“It’s not the sort of language that I would use, but what I’m trying to do is de-escalate,” Badenoch insisted.

Dale said many listeners would have been thinking it would be responsible for the leader of the opposition to de-escalate.

She said: “I disagree, a lot of people would have interpreted his remarks very differently.”

She then insisted she is not a commentator, and that “it is a trap” to start condemning people over such events.

That evidently did not please the listener who asked the initial question.

“I’m afraid that didn’t answer any of my questions whatsoever,” the member of the public said, noting that everyone who marched behind Robinson knows he is “openly racist”.