Kemi Badenoch

I know how many people worry about what happens to their home when they’re gone. And I get it. You spend a lifetime paying it off, and then the government takes a slice before it can pass to your children.

Inheritance tax was meant to be for the super wealthy. Now it hits ordinary families in every corner of the country.

Your home is where you watched your children take their first steps. Where you put up the same decorations every Christmas. Wanting to pass it on to your family is one of the most human instincts there is.

That’s why the next Conservative government will make sure nobody ever pays inheritance tax on their family home.

On top of that, couples will be able to leave an extra £1 million tax free. Every inheritance tax bill will be cut, and the number of families paying it will fall by more than half.

You’ve worked hard and saved. What you’ve built should go to your family, not the government.

See you next year, Conference.

Net Zero is the clearest example. Targets imposed without regard to their extortionate cost have made energy more expensive, weakened our industry and left Britain more dependent on foreign powers. Under my leadership, Conservatives will abolish those targets and put reliable, affordable energy first.

We will not stop there. We will reverse the attacks on business property relief, investment and aspiration. We will reverse Labour’s tax on family farms. We will reverse Labour’s spiteful tax on private schools that has resulted in fewer schools, fewer teachers and less money. Bad policies do not become permanent simply because Labour passed them. Not with me.

Be optimistic knowing that the tide has run in one direction for too long and that we are going to turn it.

But voters must be clear about the choice. None of this happens unless you vote Conservative. Umming and ahhing over other parties or talk of ‘uniting the right’ will not deliver lower taxes or cheaper energy. It will deliver more Labour, more nationalisation and more Andy Burnham.

I am an optimist, but I am not naïve. I know exactly how to get Britain back on a growth path - it is not pie-in-the-sky, but a real, common-sense, practical plan, based on experience and evidence.

A resumption of growth and a shrinking of the State would utterly transform our current malaise into pride and enthusiasm again.

My older colleagues, who lived through the 1970s and 1980s, tell me they couldn’t believe the change in mood precipitated by Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. In the 1980s, Britons were proud of their country, richer and happier. I’ll make sure every Briton rediscovers that national pride - if the electorate allows me to.

So, I’m sure you’re wondering by now, what’s the 1 per cent on which Andy and I actually agree? He’s right that working people are overtaxed. I will reduce those taxes too.

Yesterday Andy https://t.me/BurnhamGM was sworn in as Prime Minister. We are yet to hear his full policy proposals, but I’m getting a better sense of what he’s about - and only one per cent of it is good.

He clearly believes that working people are over-taxed, and capital (or ‘wealth’ as he calls it) is under-taxed.

What he doesn’t understand is that wealth must be created before politicians can distribute it.

Like most socialists, he believes that people are wealthy because they’ve ‘taken’ more than their fair share of what is for the government to hand out. He has said that the State is too centralised, and he will extend ‘Manchesterism’ to the wider country.

Burnham has said that he believes some important industries, like water as well as, bizarrely, the National Lottery, should be nationalised, because he believes that the State is better at running these than the private sector. But most importantly, he has said that he can solve the ‘cost of living crisis’ with a more activist State punishing the ‘rich’.

He is not just a little bit wrong with this analysis – he is 99 per cent wrong.

A younger generation, who have never lived through the consequences of old-fashioned socialism, are about to discover why.

The ‘cost of living crisis’ is the current expression for the failure of this country to improve its standard of living for nearly two decades. To give you context, our economy is performing worse than it has done in more than 200 years.

Take-home pay, adjusted for direct taxes and inflation, is no higher that it was in 2008, the year of the Global Financial Crisis. Why? Because the misguided policies of my predecessors, and more importantly, the anti-growth and anti-jobs policies of this Labour government, have crushed our enterprise culture, our joie-de-vivre and our work-hard spirit. New and brilliant ideas, which anyone can have, used to be turned into new businesses. Not any more.

Burnham is obsessed with repudiating Lady Thatcher. He seems unaware that under her, Britain created myriad new businesses; we created jobs in new industries, replacing more than all the lost jobs in old heavy, dangerous industries like coal mining.

But Margaret Thatcher and her government didn’t create these jobs, ordinary people did. It’s not government that creates growth, it’s business. The Government just provided an environment in which enterprise was rewarded, not punished.

They loosened or abolished pointless regulations, and successful sectors – like financial services, were liberated, admired and praised. But they weren’t ‘supported’. Successful sectors don’t need ‘supporting’. In fact, the City was a ‘tax-rich’ sector, largely because many of its employees were very highly paid and hence paid a lot of income tax (at 40 per cent, not(itals) 45 per cent).

That’s why the Conservatives’ diagnosis of our cost-of-living crisis is the exact opposite of Andy Burnham’s.

We would get out of the way of enterprise, not nationalise it.

We would massively reduce the regulations that hamper every sector of the economy, without taking away the vital rules that prevent exploitation.

If we find an underperforming sector – and the water industry is one of those sectors – we would seek to understand the deep causes of underperformance and act to remedy them, rather than simply imposing knee-jerk nationalisation. In regulated monopolies, of which water is one, the solution often lies in better regulation which, given the business experience in my Shadow Cabinet and my own experience as a former Secretary of State for Trade and Business, we can understand and guide.

When Burnham’s reckless experiment inevitably runs aground, we Conservatives will be ready. We’ve got a serious plan to get Britain working again. This is not an empty slogan, and I will keep making the case about why my position - the Conservatives’ position - on this is right.

For too long, Conservatives accepted Labour’s settlement. Labour introduced bad ideas and, instead of reversing them, previous Conservatives merely tried to manage them better. Not me.

Congratulations to John Healey on his appointment.

He can now ensure the Defence Investment Plan is properly funded. Conservatives will work with him to cut benefits so we can fund defence.

Because we can’t have higher taxes or even more borrowing.

Delighted to announce that Nick Timothy is the new Shadow Justice Secretary.

As an MP, Nick has led the way in revealing the failure of West Midlands Police Chief over the Maccabi football ban, and in opposing Labour's sinister Islamophobia definition.

He is a true Conservative, brings a wealth of experience, and is a formidable campaigner.

Nick will be a massive asset to the Shadow Cabinet team as we continue to develop our plans for a stronger economy, stronger borders and a stronger country.

Since Labour took over, growth has been flat, unemployment has increased every month and inflation has almost doubled.

We need a government with a plan. Conservatives have the plan, the experience and the team to get the country back on track. We will scrap bad taxes like stamp duty and high-street business rates to get our housing market moving again and revitalise our town centres.

We’ll crack down on benefits to get Britain back to work. And we’ll leave the ECHR to stop the boats once and for all. These are the right steps to give Britain the kick-start it desperately needs.

My words in the Daily Mail.

Leaving the EU but joining a customs union is like throwing away the burger and eating the napkin, said the Conservative peer Lord Hannan. He’s right.

Recent weeks have seen a bizarre push by some Labour and Lib Dem politicians – including in major newspaper interviews – to rejoin the EU’s customs union.

Most of these MPs were not present during the political chaos of 2017–2019 that followed the Brexit referendum, during which many in Westminster fought to overturn the vote. And those Labour MPs who were there, and who now want to rejoin the customs union, clearly learned nothing. The only people advocating for such a policy – and here I include the trade union bosses who have also proposed it – do not understand what a customs union actually is.

As a former Trade Secretary, I know that trade is about hard choices. You defend British interests. You say no to deals that are easy to sign but bad for the country. Yet Labour, despite all the dramatic changes to the global trade system this year, have still not grasped one simple lesson. Trade policy is power: lose control of it, and you lose the ability to govern yourself.

This is why the renewed chatter about dragging Britain back into the EU’s customs union should worry us all. It is not a sign of pragmatism – it is a symptom of Labour’s weakness.

It’s now painfully obvious to everyone that Keir Starmer entered government without a plan. The list of humiliating U-turns is so long that, I hear, Labour MPs now think twice before supporting a policy announcement in case the PM scraps it a week later.

From winter fuel payments to freezing income tax thresholds and the Family Farm Tax, Labour haven’t just broken their pre-election promises, they’ve inflicted untold damage to the British economy while doing so.

And now the government is weak and has no plan or new ideas, it has re-opened old Brexit wounds in the vain hope that doing so will make it more popular.

It won’t. Going back into the customs union would make us all poorer and damage British business and British farming. Four major benefits of Brexit would be lost: we would no longer be able to set our own tariffs, negotiate our own trade deals, maintain the deals we’ve signed as an independent nation, or reject deals struck by others, even when they harmed our interests.

Worse, the bloc would demand even more concessions from us to rejoin – and this hapless Labour government would no doubt surrender. Keir Starmer’s previous attempts at ‘negotiating’ with the EU have been one humiliation after another.

The PM gave up our fishing rights to get into an EU ‘defence fund’ that we still don’t have access to, and then paid almost £600million to rejoin an Erasmus scheme we’d decided was too expensive at £100million and was mostly being used by EU students studying here, not young Brits going abroad.

Starmer’s trade agreement with President Trump, though considerably worse than the deal the Conservatives had ready to go with America, is nevertheless clearly better than anything the EU has managed to agree with the world’s most important economy.

Why would we give up the trade deals we’ve negotiated, all structured to work for British businesses, to join a customs union designed to benefit firms in EU countries, with vastly different priorities? Britain is in a slump. Talk of a customs union is a distraction. I’m not here to make excuses for previous Conservative governments: we got things wrong, or we’d still be in government.

However, we did leave Labour the fastest-growing economy in the G7, record levels of employment and inflation on target at 2 per cent.

We also had a clear trade policy: as Trade Secretary, I signed our biggest post-Brexit deal in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), securing preferential access to a vast market of 500 million people in the Indo-Pacific region – which will account for half of global economic growth in the next decade – while defending our farmers and making no migration concessions.