Conservative leader Kemie Badenock said her approach to the economy would be “the exact opposite” of Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
An interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on her first day in office gave Badenock a first look at her policy priorities, which include reversing the rise in VAT for private schools.
She said the Conservatives had “made a lot of mistakes” before their historic election defeat, including on immigration and tax, but rejected a “postmortem” on her predecessor and claimed the party-gate scandal had been “exaggerated”.
Badenock said shadow cabinet appointments were expected in the coming days and she wanted to show the party was united with elite-selected frontbenchers.
Asked whether she would overturn the chancellor’s decision to increase employers’ National Insurance (NI) contributions, Badenock said she was not the chancellor and had “very few” MPs.
“We can’t oppose anything in terms of passing legislation,” she said, adding that she could only “make the argument that raising taxes in this way … will not grow our economy and will We are all poorer for leaving.”
However, when asked directly if she would reverse the trend of VAT increases for private schools, Badenock was unequivocal, saying “Yes, yes I would… because it’s a tax on aspirations, but no.” will raise any funds” and therefore “violates our principles.”
Badenock also told Ms Kuenssberg that “government does not create growth, business creates growth”, adding that this was “the exact opposite of what Rachel Reeves did”.
Badenock, the party’s first black leader at Westminster, said she disagreed not only with Reeves’ economic policies but also with the way she discussed becoming Britain’s first female chancellor in 800 years .
“I think the best thing is when we get to the point where the color of your skin is no more noticeable than the color of your eyes or the color of your hair,” she said.
“What’s amazing to me is that Rachel Reeves keeps talking about how she became the first female Prime Minister, which to me is a very, very low glass ceiling within the Labor Party that she has probably broken. this ceiling.
“Not nearly as significant as what other women in this country have accomplished.”
She also criticized the leadership of her predecessor Rishi Sunak, saying he had lost the trust of voters because “promises on immigration and tax were not kept and that is what we need to change”.
Badenock resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet over her handling of the Chris Pincher affair, which she said had led to the public perception that “we no longer speak for them or look after them, we do it for ourselves”.
But when it came to the Partygate scandal, she said Johnson had fallen into a “trap”.
“A lot of what happened around Party Gate wasn’t the reason I resigned – I think that was a little overblown,” she said.
“We shouldn’t have fixed penalty notices… that’s not adhering to our principles.”
Asked to apologize for the economic turmoil under Liz Truss, Badenock said she wanted to “draw a line” at the mistakes of the previous leader and rejected every conservative comment “over the past 14 years” Party leaders conduct “postmortems.”
Instead, Badenock said her focus was on rebuilding trust and creating a sense of unity within the party, although she said that was “very tricky,” especially when “not everyone wants to serve.”
She added: “There are many reasons why the public does not trust us – commitments are not kept and there is a lack of unity.”
Speaking about the loss of Tory voters at the last election under Nigel Farage’s Reform Britain, Badenock denied she would offer voters “more of the same”.
She said: “In my view, Nigel Farage and the success of reform are a symptom of a lack of clarity and consistency in the Conservative Party’s values and how we use those Conservative values to communicate to the British people.
“If we get it right then I think people will start to see that reform is nothing more than a Tory saboteur and will only create more and more Labor governments.”
