From 2h ago
09.36 GMT
Kemi
Badenoch admits Tories made mistakes on Brexit, saying party had ‘no plan for
growth outside EU’
Good
morning. Keir Starmer is in Ukraine and, as Pippa Crerar and Luke Harding
report, he is signing a 100-year partnership deal with the president, Volodymyr
Zelenskyy.
Back in the
UK it is also an important day for Kemi Badenoch, who is delivering a major
speech on the subject “Rebuilding Trust”. She has been leader of the
Conservative party for just over three months, and so far she has not had much
success. Her performances in the Commons have been mediocre, her pronouncements
on policy and values have either been predictable and reductive, and sometimes
just bizarre, and she is being outplayed by Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party
is hoovering up her vote and is now level pegging with the Tories in the polls.
One problem
Badenoch has is that she is leader of a party that suffered its worst election
result in 200 years because its record in office was generally seen to be
terrible. Badenoch has often said that the party made mistakes while it was in
power, but she has not done much to disown former leaders and she has not
managed to persuade voters yet that she represents a radical break with the
past.
Today’s
speech seems to be an attempt to change that. On the basis of the fairly
lengthy extracts released overnight, it contains her strongest criticism yet of
the mistakes made by the past government (of which she was part – but only at
cabinet level from September 2022).
Here is the
key passage.
I will
acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes …
We
announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for
growth outside the EU.
We
made it the law that we would deliver net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And
only then did we start thinking about how we would do that.
We
announced that we would lower immigration, but immigration kept going up.
These
mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and
then tried to work it out later.
That
is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country
around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear.
The
admission that the Tories failed on immigration sounds largely like a rehash of
a speech Badenoch gave in November. She has frequently criticised net zero
targets in the past. But what she is saying about Brexit does seem to be new.
Last year
she criticised the fact that the last Conservative government organised a
referendum on Brexit without a plan for implementing it if people voted to
leave. This was a relatively bold thing to say, because it was obviously a
rebuke to David Cameron, and at the time he was back in cabinet as foreign
secretary. But comments like this were popular with the pro-Brexit Tory
mainstream, who by that point were suspicious of Cameron.
Today
Badenoch seems to be saying something slightly different – that Brexit went
wrong not just because there was no plan in 2016, but because there was no plan
in 2020. This means she’s also blaming Theresa May for Brexit failures, and
probably Boris Johnson too. We will find out this afternoon quite how far she
is willing to go in condemning Johnson, who is still popular with Tory members,
but it seems to be a new approach.
Here is the
agenda for the day.
Morning:
Keir Starmer is in Kyiv, where he is meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian
president, and signing a 100-year partnership deal.
9.30am: Lisa
Nandy, the culture secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Morning:
Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry
as part of the module covering vaccines.
10.30am: Ed
Davey, the Lib Dem leader, gives a speech on British leadership and links with
Europe.
Noon: John
Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.
1.30pm: Kemi
Badenoch delivers a speech on restoring trust.
Afternoon:
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, holds a meeting with regulators, urging them to
do more to promote growth.
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