Kemi Badenoch: Labour won’t change — Tony Blair is wasting his time
Dear Tony,
(If I may), You are right to ask Labour MPs to focus on a proper political project that increases our economic and military strength. Good luck with that. They won’t do it. The only political project they are interested in is proving you wrong. Embarrassed by your three general election wins which rejected Labour’s core principles, they will test to destruction all the left-wing ideas that were mothballed in 1979.
It is your education reforms that Bridget Phillipson is unravelling. Your restraints on trade unions have been dismantled by Angela Rayner. Your Clause IV moment was discarded this month as Keir Starmer nationalised British Steel.
Those vying to replace him will be no better. Wes Streeting congratulates himself for reducing NHS waiting lists (he simply deleted names off the list). Andy Burnham’s reply proves your point better than I ever could. Faced with your warning that Labour needs growth, cheaper energy and welfare restraint, his answer is more state control, more public spending and another attack on markets and enterprise.
Burnham will learn the hard way that spending taxpayers’ money as mayor is much easier than finding it as prime minister.
Labour MPs do not know where money comes from. That is why this prime minister is a dud, and why every contender lining up to replace him will be one too. When I argue for “wealth creators”, they recoil. They cannot understand that these people make the whole country richer, not just themselves. To Labour, one person’s success must always have come at somebody else’s expense.
It is why Rachel Reeves’s criminally stupid decisions to increase employers’ national insurance and tax farmers and family businesses have caused so much damage. The chancellor now wants to set the price of eggs, just as the chickens of her first budget come home to roost. At least the market has found one price signal Labour understands, as their MPs are banned from many pubs and hair salons.
British families and businesses are not suffering because government hasn’t intervened enough. They are suffering because government taxes too much, spends too much and regulates too much, making basic necessities, especially energy, more expensive.
You are right to say we need to be both sensible and radical. That will mean repealing the terrible measures in the Climate Change Act (CCA), brought in by Ed Miliband in 2008 after you left: a policy which all subsequent Conservative leaders subscribed to until I took the wheel.
Everyone knows we need cheaper energy. Labour acknowledge this, so they promise “lower bills” by taxing everyone to subsidise the class of people who are still voting for them: welfare recipients.
They ban new drilling in the North Sea. Preferring to import energy from anywhere else, even Russia.
We’ve paid billions in subsidies to import wood pellets from Canada and burn them in Yorkshire, because the system pretends this is “renewable” if trees are replanted later. These are the absurdities of Miliband’s CCA. Absurdities obvious in places like Aberdeen, a city that powered British energy but is now neglected by politicians who think oil and gas unfashionable.
Across the country, communities see politicians who do not know how to fix problems, but keep making them worse. That is the cause of the disillusionment.
How we fix things
Sometimes ideas which look good at the time turn out to be counterproductive.
Your constitutional changes were meant to strengthen the United Kingdom. Instead, separatists now run Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Your legal and judicial reforms were meant to protect rights. Instead, they have created the lawfare and planning nightmare you now condemn. Your Human Rights Act has created a system where Britain struggles to deport foreign criminals. It rewards asylum claims that are an insult to common sense: sudden “conversions” to Christianity, followed by a return to Islam once settled.
The Blairite legacy is that the entire country is now run by HR as Labour junk your best ideas and champion your worst.
So you’re right: we need problem-solvers. It’s why I trained as an engineer and later, why I came into politics. I know that real problem-solving starts with diagnosing the root cause. It means facing the facts as they are, not as we wish them to be. Well, Tony surely now you must accept that the facts of life are Conservative.
There is only one show in town for the political project you proposed. In the short term, the Conservative project is relentlessly focused on delivering a high-growth, lower-immigration economy, cheaper energy by scrapping Miliband’s net-zero targets, reducing Starmer’s ballooning welfare bill and putting the money directly into defence to increase our military strength. If we want to lead the world in AI, and get those businesses to employ people and create growth, we need to stop Reeves hammering them with more costs and stop Rayner crushing them with thousands of pages of employment law.
Everything you outlined is what I have already made Conservative policy over the past 18 months. I even published them in an alternative King’s Speech. These are the issues I raise week in, week out at prime minister’s questions.
Having said that, there was one thing your essay failed to address — the question of who we are as a nation. A country without a shared sense of identity and values is not going to be in the “Premier League of nations”.
You only need to look at the frightening surge in antisemitism, the many thousands of people marching over foreign wars or uniting the kingdom, the endless spate of shoplifting, which is not due to a lack of police officers but a degradation in our culture, to see that something has changed beyond a lack of economic growth and it needs fixing.
Culture matters. We are more than a series of economic units working to deliver growth. We are a people, a nation. This country is our home not a hotel. The inability of Labour politicians to articulate that beyond dull platitudes has led to more division.
Addressing these frustrations is not “fighting culture wars”. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to live where these aren’t issues. But we do need to take seriously the concerns of those, who do not have the luxury of spending their weekends and summers on yachts. We are the ones who feel the collapse of consequences, the lack of enforcement and let’s face it, the lack of a clue from Labour.
Only the Conservative Party is prepared to accept difficult decisions must be made, prepared to do the work. I am determined we do not repeat the mistakes of the recent past. Not everyone will agree and I’m sure we won’t get everything right but we are the only option to deliver the agenda you describe.
Let’s be honest what are your other options? Reform? A one-man-band whose leader is too exhausted to turn up for work so skips parliament? The Greens who want to ban drinking in parliament but legalise heroin? The Lib Dems who are think saying nothing of importance is a political strategy?
The fundamental problem is that all these parties are stuffed with people who believe that politics is a popularity contest, the winner being the one who gives out the most goodies.
This is why I am recruiting a new generation of Conservative candidates for a new Conservative party; people who are prepared to take difficult decisions and are in politics to solve this country’s problems, not because they would like a career in reality TV later.
Everyone can see that Labour is making an almighty mess of our economy. History shows, only one party has ever managed to fix what they’ve broken: the Conservative Party.
You are right to mock Burnham’s self-serving hypocrisy — saying that Britain has been on the wrong path for 40 years or claiming the 1970s are the example to follow. Yet this, the worst of the past, is the only future Labour now offers. Don’t expect Labour to change. Don’t waste your time with these essays. Only one person in your party takes them seriously and he’s helping the police with their inquiries. If you want serious change at the next election my advice to you — as it is to everyone who is sick of Starmerism — is to vote Conservative. After all, as someone once said, things can only get better.