Badenoch is right: not all cultures are equally valid

Kemi Badenoch kicked up an almighty stink when she argued at the weekend that not all cultures are ‘equally valid’ when it comes to immigration. The Tory leadership contender was forced to clarify her comments, made in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘I actually think it extraordinary to think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say,’ she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The truth is, Badenoch is right – and to pretend otherwise is a mistake.

There can be no better reminder that the different qualities of culture matter very much indeed

I’m a doctor and the idea that all cultures are equal, at least in the way they practice medicine, is absurd. Some years ago, the historian David Wootton wrote a slim and beautifully argued book called Bad Medicine. Wootton raged at the cultural relativism so universal in his peers. He pointed out that medical histories, in their effort to treat all cultures as equally valid, overlook whether the approaches of other places and other times actually worked. Medical