Kemi Badenoch will commit to “dismantling” the legal framework she claims was implemented by the 1997-2010 New Labour government and left unchallenged by consecutive Conservative administrations.
Addressing activists at Conservative Party conference on Wednesday, the Tory leadership contender will outline a plan to tackle what her campaign team calls “the Blair and Brown framework of ever increasing social, economic and legal control.”
The former business and trade secretary will claim that while Gordon Brown was defeated at the 2010 general election, “the truth is the left never left.”
Badenoch is also expected to set out further detail of her economic agenda, stressing the need to increase UK productivity. She will defend wealth creation and insist that without it the government cannot deliver effective public services or help the poorest in society.
The Conservative leadership candidate will explain that, as business secretary, she saw first-hand how investors and businesspeople are leaving the UK.
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“The Conservatives have to be the party of wealth creation”, Badenoch is expected to say. “Wealth is not a dirty word. It supports jobs and families. It pays for our schools, for our health service. We should encourage it.”
The comments come after Badenoch jokingly told a conference fringe event on Tuesday evening that up to 10 per cent of civil servants are “very, very bad”.
Asked if she approved of term limits for civil servants, an idea proposed by Vivek Ramaswamy when he was running to be the Republican candidate for president, Badenoch went on to joke that the 10 per cent of “very bad” civil servants are “should be in prison bad.”
She said: “I don’t want people to get me wrong – I think that civil servants are like everybody else. They come in to do a job, and I’d say about 10% of them are absolutely magnificent.
“And the trick to being a good minister is to find the good ones quickly, keep them close and try and get the bad ones out of your department.
“There’s about 5 to 10 per cent of them who are very, very bad — you know, should be in prison bad — leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers, agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union led.
“But most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones.”
Maternity pay row points to larger problem for Kemi Badenoch
This conference, Badenoch and her campaign team have been forced to grapple with the aftermath of her suggestion that statutory maternity pay is “excessive”.
Speaking to Times Radio on Sunday, the shadow housing secretary said that regulations around the benefit had “gone too far” and were tying businesses in too much red tape.
Asked whether it was set at the right level, she said: “Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function — where it’s statutory maternity pay — a function of tax.
“Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.”
The comments were quickly rejected by other contenders, including Tom Tugendhat who said he wanted to see “strong maternity and paternity pay”.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.
Tom Tugendhat hits back at Badenoch over maternity pay comments
