MEZIESBLOG

New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch opens her speech by asking a question: “How do you know whether a politician is actually going to do what it is they say they’ll do?

“You can only look back on their track record,” she says.

She says when she was business secretary, she “tried to lift the burden off businesses” by fighting with other departments over regulation, saying she saw herself as their “champion around the cabinet table”.

“It is because I know that it is not government that creates growth – it is business. Government often needs to get out of the way,” she argues.

Badenoch: Labour ‘doubling down on mistakes we made in government’

New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch opens her speech by asking a question: “How do you know whether a politician is actually going to do what it is they say they’ll do?

“You can only look back on their track record,” she says.

She says when she was business secretary, she “tried to lift the burden off businesses” by fighting with other departments over regulation, saying she saw herself as their “champion around the cabinet table”.

“It is because I know that it is not government that creates growth – it is business. Government often needs to get out of the way,” she argues.

‘An unprecedented raid’

But people “want the government to fix everything”, and “if you ever sound hesitant, they will make you out to be a cruel, unfeeling person, as I have discovered to my own personal cost”.

That is “partly” how debt has reached record levels.

Reflecting on growth, Mrs Badenoch says Britain has not “done the work which is needed to understand what the root causes of our problems are”.

She says she is “worried” that Labour is “not just repeating many of the mistakes which we made in government – they are doubling down on them, and combining them with an unprecedented raid on business”.

‘Capitalism is not a dirty word’

In terms of her own party, she repeats her oft-repeated desire to “return to first principles”.

Those are “free and fair competition” in the market, and her party being “the party of business” of all sizes.

“Capitalism is not a dirty word, wealth is not a dirty word, profit is not a dirty word. But we need to start explaining how these things deliver for the people out there,” she says.

The system is “broken”, she asserts, and argues that “government itself must change… is growth is ever properly to return”, which entails making decisions much quicker and being far more responsive to the needs of business.

Would Tories scrap rise to employers’ national insurance?

Kemi Badenoch next takes a couple of questions from journalists – the first coming from Sky’s business and economics correspondent Gurpreet Narwan.

She asks the new Tory leader if a government under her leadership would reverse the rise in employers’ national insurance (NICs) that was announced in the budget.

Mrs Badenoch says where she sees measures that “will obviously not work and will not raise any money, we will change that”.

She points to her having already committed to reversing the changes to inheritance tax that are affecting farmers, and says the Tories did not set employers’ NICs so high.

“One of the things we’re going to have to do is rewire everything, so what I’m not going to do is comment on every bit of micro-policy,” she adds.

‘Tax on jobs’

Of course, the hike to employers’ NICs is expected to raise £25bn a year by the end of this parliament, and is one of the largest parts of the entire mammoth fiscal statement.

Mrs Badenoch goes on to say things “may change” in the coming years ahead of the next general election, but under the “first principles” she is returning to, employers’ NICs is “a tax on jobs”.

“So we need to make sure the balance is right,” she says, and given that small businesses are saying this measure is “unaffordable”, politicians should “look again” at it.

But she does not explicitly commit to repealing the measure, as she did with the hike in inheritance tax for farmers.

Labour blasts Badenoch for not saying if she would reverse national insurance rise

We’ve just had a response from the Labour Party to the new Tory leader’s speech at the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference.

A Labour spokesperson said: “After weeks of campaigning against it, Kemi Badenoch is now refusing to say whether she would actually reverse the employer national insurance rise.” (see previous post).

“The opposition seem to finally accept that the damage they did to the economy made tax rises necessary – but the least the public deserve is an answer on what their actual position is.”