Badenoch’s apocalyptic rhetoric has set the bar for her policy revolution extremely high

HENRY HILL

Kemi Badenoch’s speech yesterday at the conference organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship certainly made a splash: ‘western civilisation may fall without Tories‘ is how the Times summed up her message.

It raises a few ideological questions. As Sebastian Milbank of the Critic has pointed out: “In her 15 minute speech, Badenoch mentioned conservatism not at all, whilst continually referring to and defending liberalism.”

This is by no means antithetical to the modern Conservative tradition, which has plenty of libertarians in it. But it’s not an obvious basis for winning back those voters who first took a chance on the Tories in 2019, who tend to fall firmly into the neglected ‘left on economics, right on culture’ quadrant of the British political compass.

There is also some tension between Badenoch’s forthright defence of “classical liberalism” and her praise of Katherine Birbalsingh’s school, Michaela, as an example of what the defence of ‘western values’ looks like.

It’s undoubtedly an excellent school, and as an adaptation to its circumstances it works very well. But is its indisputably authoritarian and secularist ethos, which bans prayer rooms on the one hand and enforces vegetarian meals to avoid religious conflict on the other, actually an embodiment of ‘western values’, historically speaking? More importantly, is it any sort of template for the liberal society Badenoch claims to want?

Beyond that, however, there are a couple of other issues raised by the speech, this time on the thorny subject of policy. For example, Badenoch trialled a new gambit for shedding the albatross that is the Conservatives’ record in office:

“Sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it’s the second time around when you really know how to fix them.”

The comparison was with Donald Trump. But here the “first stint in government” was 14 years, rather than four, so the line risks sounding a little presumptuous. There is also the fact that the Party’s diagnosis of what went wrong has yet to extend beyond banal statements of the obvious, such as that immigration and taxes were too high – not things that took a decade and a half of careful observation to work out.

Badenoch’s leadership pitch was that members should make her leader and the Party would do all the intellectual heavy-lifting afterwards. Yet even with a self-denying ordinance on new policy proposals, what was missing was anything resembling a granular diagnosis of the problem; if experience in government is supposed to be what furnished it, why didn’t she have one?

Next, there’s public spending. Here again, there was a rallying cry which would surely be music to the ears of many Conservatives:

“The world owes no-one a living. Millions of people cannot just sit on welfare and expect to be paid to do so – and if they don’t like it that’s their problem, not the State’s!”

Fine. But as Anthony Eden pithily observed: “Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.” If Badenoch is going to make a big push for a smaller state, where is the axe going to fall?

Sure, we should of course wait for the outcome of the great policy review (unless we shouldn’t). But one of our new leader’s first policy interventions was opposing the Government’s move to means-test the Winter Fuel Allowance; during the leadership campaign she (like everyone else) pledged herself to maintaining the triple lock on pensions.

Whatever you think of either position, they are objectively about funnelling public cash indiscriminately to (amongst others!) people who don’t need it – not an obvious starting point for reining in spending, especially if the Conservatives end up proposing cuts to welfare targeted at the less well-off.

Readers may also remember the row over Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay during the leadership contest; others have highlighted the difficulty she got into on TRIGGERnometry when asked how she would turn her statements on immigration and culture into actual policy.

Likewise, the claim that Britain needs “smaller government and smarter spending” sounds fine on the surface, but in the past Badenoch has shied away from any meaningful implications of such, as we noted back in November, when she said the following:

“I think the tax burden was too high under the Conservatives. That doesn’t mean that we have to cut public services. It means that we have to look at how we are delivering public services…”

If ‘smaller government and smarter spending’ just means the upteenth hunt for efficiency savings, it means nothing. It could mean something much more substantial, but that would involve making much harder choices and firmer commitments, which the leader has (so far) been unwilling to do.

That is, potentially, a strategic problem. Badenoch’s rhetoric about the fate of the West was almost apocalyptic in tone. Such rhetoric demands a suitably radical policy agenda to match it; if it doesn’t materialise, the rhetoric will start to look ridiculous.

But unlike in the 1970s, there is no coherent agenda on that scale waiting to be picked up. More seriously for Badenoch, she sought no mandate for one in the leadership contest, and many of her supporters explicitly backed her because they didn’t like Robert Jenrick’s answers to these questions. Even if she eventually tries to execute the sort of radical pivot her rhetoric implies, it isn’t clear that Badenoch would be able to take her Shadow Cabinet or MPs with her.

Finally, there was one big lacuna in the speech: the almost complete absence of economic analysis. “We have been naïve on economic growth” is about all there was.

Yet if you want to explain why so many young people are disaffected with Britain in general and the Conservatives in particular, economics is almost certainly much more important than universities “poisoning young minds” or political leaders not having “faith in our values”.

This country simply offers a miserable bargain to net-contributor taxpayers in general and young people in particular. If you joined the workforce after the crash, you have never known meaningful real wage growth; at the same time, the upward pressure on the cost of essentials, most obviously housing, has been relentless. Many live at home well into their twenties and have to flatshare well into their thirties; if they went to university after 2010, Plan 2 tuition fee repayments see them paying a usuriously high marginal tax rate.

Of course, there’s only so much you can fit into a 15-minute speech. Yet for all the language about “telling the truth” and “the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation”, Badenoch’s choice of what to emphasise is telling.

Cultural issues matter, and her interest in them is undoubtedly sincere. But they cannot hope to stand up to scrutiny as the main diagnosis for what has gone wrong, not alongside the simple fact that this is a country where voters are feeling poorer and public services don’t work. What we really need from the leader is a speech on that.

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This article (Badenoch’s apocalyptic rhetoric has set the bar for her policy revolution extremely high) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Henry Hill

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