Live discussion from the Conservative Party conference

Westminster Hour

The Westminster Hour provides a live analysis from the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, focusing on Kemi Badenoch's consolidation of power and her new

Key takeaways

• Kemi Badenoch released a 95-page booklet titled The Right Way, emphasizing first principles on economy, defence, and immigration while acknowledging past government mistakes.
• Dan Tomlinson criticized Conservative tax cut proposals as unfunded and warned they risk repeating Liz Truss-era economic instability.

Main topics

• Conservative Party conference
• Kemi Badenoch policy blueprint

Notable quotes

You can't fix the engine when the plane's already taken off.

Conclusion

The episode underscores a deeply fractured UK political landscape where both major parties are

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hello and welcome to this edition of the Westminster Hour, coming to you from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, where Kemi Badenoch's grip on her party is secure, but there is still an electoral mountain to climb. Two years on from a crushing election defeat, Reform UK is ahead in the polls, while Andy Burnham has given Labour a jolt of energy and a new agenda to fight on. A huge philosophical divide is now opening up between Labour and the Conservatives, so a big question here... is how should the Tories respond? Let's meet our panel. And with me, I have Alex Burghardt, Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar and Deputy Leader of the Party. Before politics, Alex led an academic life as a historian and teacher specialising in the early medieval period. And you've been in demand recently, haven't you, Alex, for your expertise on the Bayeux Tapestry, which we've just been hearing about in the news. You've got your own replica on display here. Tell listeners about it who may not get the privilege of seeing it themselves. It's been updated to reflect more recent political events from a conservative perspective. Yeah, Speaker 6 (1:06) there's a very funny Birmingham tapestry on display in conference, which charts everything from the rise of Keir Starmer to, you know, the takeover of Andy Burnham to the current situation that... that the country finds itself in. And it's been one of the most popular things at conference so far. It features... a lot of very well-known faces and episodes. It is Speaker 3 (1:30) quite a production. But didn't you watch the Labour Party conference? Andy Burnham made almost no mention of the Conservative Party, shunning the old point-scoring, Yabu sucks politics of old, but you've made a whole tapestry mocking your political opponents. It's a bit behind the times, isn't it? Speaker 6 (1:43) Yeah, I think you'll find that Andy Burnham spent a long time sort of slagging off the 1980s and pretending that the faults of the country were down to Margaret Thatcher. No, I'm not sure that he's quite as Speaker 3 (1:54) pure Speaker 6 (1:55) as you might Speaker 3 (1:56) have him. Scarlett Maguire is with us, too, a former journalist and polling expert. Scarlett runs her own consultancy, Merlin Strategy, and you do the rounds of all these party conferences, don't you, Scarlett? What do you make of the atmosphere here? It feels pretty good, Speaker 7 (2:10) actually. Potentially better than I expected, but it Speaker 3 (2:12) feels like everyone's in quite a good mood. Lucy Fisher, sitting next to you, Whitehall editor of the Financial Times and host of the FT's Political Fix podcast is here. Our insider guide to the week ahead. You're a historian too, aren't you? Written books about the suffragettes and women in the First World War. Have you seen the Tory party's tapestry effort? I have. It did Speaker 4 (2:34) make me laugh. Very sad not to be in it, of course. Speaker 3 (2:38) And Dan Tomlinson joins us down the line from home. Hi, Dan. Speaker 2 (2:42) Hello, good evening. Speaker 3 (2:43) Dan is the Labour MP for Chipping Barnet and during the summer was appointed a Treasury Minister by Andy Burnham with special responsibility for growth, which we'll come on to. First, there is plenty of history, nostalgia for Margaret Thatcher in particular at this conference. And of course, Andy Burnham has been harking back to that era too in a rather more negative light. But you were born after she left office. Dan, have you had to mug up on some history? Speaker 2 (3:09) Well, we in the Labour Party definitely know the ruin that Margaret Thatcher brought to lots of parts of the country in the 1980s. And Andy Burnham is right to say how we're going to turn things around to make our country fairer. Speaker 3 (3:22) We will come on to some of that, I am sure. Well, here in Birmingham, the Tories certainly have their tails up, whatever the opinion polls might be saying. And they are still pretty grizzly. Kemi Badenoch's big speech will be on Wednesday, but she gave a bit of a... a preview on stage this afternoon, and she's also set party members some homework, which is to read her newly published 95-page booklet setting out her approach to government, really, called The Right Way. And Lucy has read it. Speaker 4 (3:49) What's Speaker 3 (3:49) it Speaker 4 (3:49) all about? Well, look, it's quite self-consciously harking back to The Right Approach, which was... the blueprint for government printed under the Conservatives during Margaret Thatcher's leadership in the late 1970s. It sets out first principles for Conservative thinking today on subjects like the economy, defence, immigration and borders, the state. And I think it's a canny move in a sense because Kemi Badenoch needs to square the circle of explaining. what went wrong in government and what lessons she's learnt. She's trying to make clear that she acknowledges the mistakes that were made in a government that she served in herself, while also arguing that she's using opposition wisely, as she put it, doing the thinking now, because, to use her words, you can't fix the engine when the plane's already taken off. And also it allows her to look industrious, look like she's doing some important sort of policy development or some of the foundational work without actually putting too much flesh on the bone at this stage, because we could, of course, yet still be three years away from a general election. So it allows her to hold back from making the specific policy proposals. Alex, did you have any hand in this? Speaker 6 (5:00) It's all Kemi's work and it's genuinely Kemi's work. And she talked to members of the shadow cabinet. about what she was doing, and she discussed her ideas with us. But this is her achievement. And as Lucy says, this is a response to the fact that 50 years ago, the Conservative Party in opposition was faced with the fact that the Labour government was bankrupting the country, and that it was clear that the existing paradigm of government that the Conservatives themselves had used in power under Ted Heath... had run its course. And the way that they started to do it, the way Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher did it in the mid-70s, was to go back to first principles and asked what it was that would create prosperity and stability, but also political unity. And that you have to be a successful party in government because you don't know exactly what's going to happen. You have to be on the same page. You have to, I think to use Keith Joseph's phrase, you have to be able to finish each other's sentences. Speaker 3 (6:01) But it comes back, doesn't it? largely, once again, to reining back the state and cutting taxes. Slogans easier to make than to deliver practice. Speaker 6 (6:09) Have Speaker 3 (6:10) recent Tory governments read anything to go Speaker 6 (6:11) by? But I'm not sure you've read it, so I don't think you should... I have certainly Speaker 3 (6:15) looked through it. Speaker 6 (6:15) OK, but in which case you will know that it's not just slogans, is it? And it's actually an incredibly thoughtful piece, as Lucy said. And the point of it is to say, actually, the state can only do so much, and so where should its limits be? And how can we... instead of assuming that the state will do everything? How can we create the conditions for growth and prosperity in the country? And I think that that is a much more sustainable ambition. Speaker 3 (6:43) Dan, Keir Starmer had his missions and milestones. It all got fairly confusing in the end. Can you sum up now, you know, two months in, Andy Burnham's approach and a few pretty principles as Alex has tried to do for the Conservatives? A bigger state, more devolution and more spending? Speaker 2 (7:00) When it comes to growth, I think the two key things for Andy Burnham are public control, particularly around the essentials. He talks really convincingly in his speech at conference about water, about energy and about housing and about how the state having more of a grip over those fundamentals of the economy can help bring down prices for households, but also for businesses. And then secondly, devolution and making sure we can take power. away from Whitehall and away from Westminster, devolve it down to communities across England so that local leaders can work with local businesses to back economic growth. And on the pamphlet that the Conservatives put out today, I haven't read every word, but I did make sure to have a read through before coming on the programme. And my take is that I think the Conservatives are learning the wrong lessons from what happened in 2024. I grew up in Oxfordshire. That's a place that... was true blue Tory the whole time I was growing up. There's now not a single Tory MP there. And I just don't think that rowing back on net zero, suggesting in the pamphlet as they do that the national minimum wage was the wrong turn, setting out unfunded tax cuts. I just don't think that is the approach to win back parts of the country that the Conservatives. used to have as their core base, but I think will be turned off by some other changes in the direction that Camus Badenoch is setting out. Speaker 3 (8:25) An electoral dead end, Alex? Speaker 6 (8:27) Well, obviously, Dan needs a little bit longer to go through the document, because it's very obvious that you, if you, one of the things that was, that our predecessors found in the 1970s was that there were these two massive forces which were huge deadweights on prosperity, and they were union power and nationalisation, and that they had completely destroyed the ability to get private capital into public services. And what we found in doing this work, what Kemi's found, one of the things that she found is that the equivalent force in our time is a form of legalism. It is a form of aggressive expansionist legal power that... allows people to challenge everything that the government and business want to do and creates a condition of legal fear which prevents governments from even starting many things. Speaker 3 (9:20) Scarlett, this may look and sound fairly abstract to a lot of voters. What are they at the moment thinking most about and what do they think about the Tory party? Speaker 7 (9:29) I mean, I think the truth is they think quite little about the Tory party, which I think is one of the party's biggest challenges. So, yes, views of Kemi Badenoch have improved substantially since this time last year. And the party is no longer, I think there were several people here this time last year, even inside the party, that thought maybe it was staring extinction in the face. I think that is no longer the case. However, what we've seen is a struggle for the Conservative Party's voting intention to improve, or really for them to move on from the image of the last election. And, you know, reading Kemi's document, I thought... It's very interesting because I thought she dealt very articulately, actually, with this question of where they went wrong before and where they might then move forward. But what I've not heard is that articulated in a sort of pithy soundbite in a way that might filter down to the public. And, you know, I can guarantee they've not said that either. So most of the time you test Kevin Badenock in polling and in focus groups. Yes, views of her have improved. Images of the Conservative Party still very much stuck in the past, still stuck in the previous government, which most voters weren't very happy with at the time. Speaker 4 (10:27) I just say we're obviously all political obsessives and it's interesting to read the theoretical foundations that Badenoch wants to build. But if we step back and look at what anything that we'll have cut through in the past 24 hours and possibly tomorrow as well, I think it's really two tax cuts. The proposal to end the cliff edge for earners on 100 grand and more. And secondly, a very clear hint. from Badenoch that she thinks it's the morally right thing to do to either end or cut inheritance tax. And I think for me, that says a really interesting signal about the direction she's taking the party and back towards its traditional, wealthier, affluent, you know, southern based voters. And to me, it seems a clear pivot away from a red wall or blue wall, whichever you prefer to call it. And Speaker 3 (11:12) we'll hear from Speaker 4 (11:12) the Speaker 3 (11:12) shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith tomorrow, new in his job. He's got a big speech. Do we have a sense of what he's going to say? Speaker 4 (11:18) We certainly do. He will be unveiling what he calls the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation. He will look at... cutting the cost of house building. He will claim knocking up to 50 grand off the cost of a new build, scrapping environmental bodies and backing plans for a third runway at Heathrow, ending what he will call the doom loop of low economic growth that this country has been trapped in for too many years. So Speaker 3 (11:44) the Tories, Dan, are putting economic growth front and centre at this conference and saying that is the key that unlocks everything else you want to do. And back in the day, growth, growth, growth was Labour's mantra too, wasn't it? The number one mission of Keir Starmer's government. But we didn't hear much about it at all last week, certainly not in Andy Burnham's speech. The big headlines were all social care, electoral reform, public control over water. Speaker 2 (12:06) Well, it just isn't true that we didn't hear about it from the PM or from the party last week. He set out a really clear theory of growth in his speech. John Healey talked really convincingly about the need to make sure that we're putting fiscal stability at the heart of our approach so that we can provide the foundations for economic growth too. And actually, as much as the Conservatives want to deny it, the economy is in a strong position at the moment. We've had the fastest growth. In the G7, in the