Is Kemi abandoning the Red Wall?

Politics At Sam and Anne's

Sam Coates and Anne McElvoy analyze the Conservative Party's strategic pivot at their Birmingham conference, focusing on Kemi Badenoch's new 'The Right Way'

Key takeaways

• Kemi Badenoch published 'The Right Way', explicitly rejecting ethno-nationalism and framing Britishness as non-ethnic to counter Reform UK.
• Andrew Griffith, the new shadow chancellor, is championing deregulation, abolishing Natural England and the Environment Agency, and pulling out of the Aarhus Convention to drive growth.

Main topics

• Tory conference strategy and economic messaging
• Kemi Badenoch's ideological positioning vs Reform UK

Notable quotes

"Britishness... is not an ethnicity test."

Conclusion

The episode reveals a Conservative Party attempting to rebrand its economic narrative and distance

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) you Speaker 1 (0:03) Hello, good morning and welcome. It's Monday, October the 5th. Kemi Badenock has been telling people she believes Andy Burnham is actually an... easier opponent than Keir Starmer at Tory conference in Birmingham. She thinks the man who has revived Labour fortunes, sharpened their direction, improved their poll rating and left the party cheering weeks after a coup, presents a bigger, more straightforward target than her predecessor because he paints in primary political colours and isn't a technocrat. Speaker 3 (0:31) Tories seem to think that the change in Labour leadership, Sam, opens up fresh political space for them to insert themselves more prominently. into the economic debate. They want to use the party conference this week to underline that. Today is business day, so they will thrust their new shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, front and centre, promising a massive package to end the so-called doom loop of economic growth or the lack of it. And he'll be promising to abolish two major quangos, Natural England and the Environment Agency end net zero regulations and push through a third runway at Heathrow. Speaker 1 (1:14) Growth, growth, growth is the message. But the big question I think this morning is, is the focus of the Tories electorally actually moving southwards? And this means it could come at the cost of the targeting of one-time Boris Johnson red wall seats. In private, I'm very struck, Anne, having lots of conversations in the last 24 hours, Tory MPs claim that there is a path to an overall majority. The polling doesn't suggest it at the moment. But they think that the arrival of Andy Burnham is a shift to the left, meaning particularly Lib Dem voters in their former Southern Hartmans will think twice before voting for a party that, you know, the Lib Dems have been pretty clear that they've put Labour in government in a hung parliament, come what may. So that is the... uprisking the Labour Party may detach some Liberal Democrat voters from voting for Ed Davies, putting across by Ed Davies' party. They think that Lib Dem voters in southern seats could peel back to them because particularly what's going on in the tax system and the economic pain that those voters are feeling. I actually heard last night one member of the shadow cabinet say that they thought that it was realistic to take 60 of these 70 odd Liberal Democrat seats, which of course the polling doesn't currently support. But British politics can move fast. Speaker 3 (2:35) It's the three letter word, as one senior Tory said to me. drinks last night is just tax so they want to talk about tax all the time they believe that that is the weak flank both for labour but potentially as you point out also for the Lib Dems partly because the Lib Dems have become they've basically lost their reputation as a lower tax party. That's not the kind of liberalism that they nowadays stand for. And also because they're seen as being ready to support Labour in any future progressive coalition. So absolutely right. The Tories do seem to see space there. Are they getting a bit ahead of themselves when they talk about taking that number of Lib Dem seats and remembering that a lot of Lib Dems aren't going to like the more kind of... red meat, blue meat, can you really? But they're not going to like the stronger end of the Tory message on things like ECHR and resistance to Europe. Also, I noticed, like you, going around last night, a lot more full-throated attacks on Nigel Farage and on reform than before. Even the claim that voters could vote Tory to keep reform out of their constituencies, an argument we've otherwise... tended to hear more from Labour and on the left of Centre. And Camille Badenoch herself talking about how strongly she wants to differentiate her brand of conservatism. Yes, robust. Yes, tough. And in many ways, as we were seeing with that economic message tearing up, what she would call red tape, other people would call an attack on conservation. But on this, on this topic against... reform and certainly restore, she is underlining that she wants to disassociate herself from the creep of ethno-nationalism and that she feels that, of course, very personally as someone who came to this country from Nigeria. Speaker 1 (4:28) So this is fascinating because it is something new in the Tory attack book, and I haven't really seen it before, but it is... the Tories settling on how they're going to go at reform and go at Nigel Farage in a way that they haven't done before. And actually, I've been flicking through the Kemi Badenoch 100-page book that she published 24 hours ago, which some people call Chemistry with a K. It's actually called The Right Way. And there's a very striking passage in that book where she says, to pick up on the theme that you just mentioned, Britishness... quote, is not an ethnicity test. So that's obviously a jab at the parties on the right. And attacks, quote, debating endlessly who ethnically counts as British, which I think Suella Braverman has been involved in that argument quite a lot recently, in certain quarters. And she basically attacks people who do that. She calls for rejecting identity politics from the right as well as the left