In her interview with Times Radio this morning, Kemi Badenoch hinted that, if Labour has legislated to make the pensions triple lock less generous by the time of the next election, a future Tory government would not reverse that.
In his party conference speech last week, Andy Burnham said he wanted to change the triple lock uprating mechanism from 2030, with the savings used to part fund his plans to set up a National Care Service. The government later said it would legislate for this before the election.
The Tories are committed to the pensions triple lock in its current form. But, asked if she would repeal any legislation passed making it less generous, Badenoch replied:
I have said that the triple lock is our policy and it remains our policy. I don’t think going after pensioners is the right thing when there are loads of people who can work, who won’t work.
When we are going to reverse Labour’s policies, I say we are going to reverse their policies.
I have said that we are keeping this policy, but if they take that money and they spend it on something that we can’t get it back from, then it would be difficult for me.
What I’m not going to do is lie to your listeners just so I can get votes. I tell the truth and I say the triple lock is our policy and we’re keeping it.
But what I’m not going to do is to say something when I don’t know what the situation would be about what Labour has done with that money. We have to be very careful.
Kemi Badenoch has been doing a series of interviews with broadcasters today. They are embarged until 5pm, which means that in about 10 minutes a serious of Badenoch stories will start to drop.
Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, has criticised the Tories’s record on defence.
In a statement after James Cartlidge, his Tory shadow, gave a speech confirming the party’s plan to spend £10bn on a new missile defence system (see 7.27am), Streeting said:
The Conservatives put more effort into defending their abysmal record than they ever put into defending Britain.
They cut the army to its smallest size since Napoleon and left a £17bn hole in the equipment plan. Their own defence secretary, Ben Wallace, admitted our armed forces had been “hollowed out and underfunded”.
James Cartlidge can turn up the volume, but he cannot erase the record. His party had 14 years. They left our country’s defence weaker. They owe Britain an apology, not another lecture.
Steven Morris is a Guardian reporter covering Wales.
Welsh ministers have announced ambitious – and expensive – plans to tackle two notorious traffic bottlenecks by building a new bridge and widening a road tunnel.
The government, led by Plaid Cymru, wants to create a third crossing of the Menai Strait in north Wales, which separates the island of Ynys Môn (Anglesey) from the mainland. The price for the new crossing is put at about £750 million.
It is also planning to get to grips with the M4 around Newport in south Wales, which is often snarled up with traffic.
Proposals there include expanding the Brynglas Tunnels from two to three lanes each way, which might cost £1.7bn.
In addition, junctions into and out of the city could be closed to cut down traffic using the M4 for short journeys.
The government has not said where the money is coming from but will look at all options, including, for example, asking for help from the UK government for funds as both schemes are important for Britain as a whole.
The deputy minister for transport, Mark Hooper, said:
We will carry out an 18-month study to consider a range of road-based solutions for the M4 around Newport. People on Ynys Môn and across the north of Wales have waited a long time for greater certainty about the future of the crossings.
The afternoon session ended with a Ukrainian school choir singing the Ukrainian national anthem, and the British national anthem. The choir also sang earlier, at the start of the afternoon session.
(Perhaps it a good job that Laura Trott’s proposed new law intended to protect school pupils from political activism hasn’t made it onto the statute book yet. See 1.13pm.)
Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions secretary, told the conference that Britain was “in deep trouble” because of the number of working-age adults on benefits.
She said:
We’re spending £170bn a year on working age welfare, two and a half times more than we spend on defence. And that’s paying for the benefits of six million people who are not working. Conference, six million!
We must, of course, look after people too sick to disabled to work. We’re a civilised society. We’re compassionate. We want a safety net to be there for people in desperate need.
But that’s not six million people. It’s simply not true that one in seven people of working age in this country is unable to work. Adam Smith wrote that the nation’s prosperity depends on the share of its people in useful work. By that measure, we are in deep trouble.
Whately also said that at the last conference she had her team had already identified cuts that would save £23bn.
But now she had found “billions more savings that mean we can cut taxes and our economy can grow”, she said.
At the Tory conference Tom Tugendhat’s speech was followed by a Q&A with the leading global historian, Sir Niall Ferguson. Many of Ferguson’s books have been about war and he told the audience that he was attending a Tory conference for the first time because he wanted to spread the message that “there is only one responsible party when it comes to national security, and it is the Conservative party”.
Ferguson also told the conference that a third world war was possible. He said:
I don’t think it’s alarmist to say that we may be on a path to another world war, because remember how the world wars began? There were regional wars before they broke out in the Balkans before 1914. And then there were wars before the war of 1939, wars in Asia, civil war in Spain. Germany’s rise didn’t begin in 1939. It began with the reoccupation of the Rhineland.
We must remember the lessons that our grandparents – and in the case of younger people here, our great-grandparents – had to learn through bitter experience. We never again want to have to see British kids in air raid shelters.
But you have to learn history’s most fundamental lesson: if you want peace, prepare for war.
Robert Jenrick, the former Tory who is now Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, has criticised Kemi Badenoch for suggesting the Tories would not reverse legislating getting rid of the pensions triple lock in its current form. (See 11.31am.)
In a statement, he said:
How can Kemi Badenoch not be willing to reverse Burnham’s plot to cut the state pension? British pensioners have paid in their entire lives and deserve more than a betrayal stitched up in Westminster.
Reform will make different choices so we can put British pensioners first. Instead of cutting pensions, we will cut wasteful spending on foreign aid, migrant welfare and net zero subsidies.
Even if we’re the only party prepared to defend it, we will go into the next election with a rock-solid pledge to keep the triple lock.
Jenrick may have been partly incentivised to attack Badenoch over this by the fact that the Tories have made him a hate figure at this conference. In the spoof Bayeux tapestry on display at the conference, there are multiple depictions of Jenrick as a diminished and humiliated figure.
Tom Tugendhat, the shadow foreign secretary, has accused Ed Miliband of putting virtue signalling ahead of keeping Britain safe.
In his speech to the conference, Tugendhat said:
We have a foreign secretary [Ed Miliband] who thinks that the right thing to do is to shake hands with the Iranian foreign minister at the same time as the Iranian government is planning to attack the United Kingdom.
We think, as Conservatives, we think that’s wrong.
We think it is wrong to have a man in the Foreign Office who ties our energy to China instead of deepening and strengthening our union by tapping resources from the North Sea now.
We think it is wrong to have a foreign secretary who chooses to virtue signal over intelligence sharing in a way that will keep Britons safe, because that isn’t serving the British people, that is serving his personal agenda.
Tugendhat was referring to Miliband’s decision to impose sanctions on Israel in relation to West Bank settlements.
He went on:
Let’s be absolutely clear, [Miliband is] not putting Britain first. He’s sacrificing Britain’s future.
Tugendhat joked that, given Andy Burnham’s propensity to change his mind, the Tories would probably be up against David Miliband in the Foreign Office soon. “At least there’s one Miliband who knows his foreign policy,” he added.
The National Education Union has accused Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, of giving a “culture wars” speech and launching a “shocking” attack on teachers.
In a response to Trott’s speech, which included an explicit attack on the NEU and a proposal to legislate to stop union activists bringing politics into the classroom (see 1.13pm), Daniel Kebede, the NEU president, said:
This was such a disappointing and cheap speech ill befitting a politician wanting to by secretary of state for education. Laura Trott had the chance today to talk about the real problems in our schools, such as funding cuts and class sizes. She chose not to. This speech chases tabloid headlines but it does not offer any coherent or joined up vision for education or a positive future for our children.
Many people at the Conservative party conference are school governors and local councillors. They set budgets that don’t add up. They witness families wait months for learning support their children are entitled to …
The slurs about hard-working teachers in this speech are shocking. Teachers already follow the law on impartiality in teaching. Parents can already see what their children learn and have high respect for the teachers they know. Forcing schools to hand over every worksheet on demand would bury teachers in paperwork.
This is a policy imported from Trump’s culture wars. When Virginia’s governor set up a line for parents to report teachers, people used it to praise them, and it closed within months. We have also seen in this country what happens when campaigns target individual teachers. Trott’s plan would put teachers at risk and drive more of them out of the profession.
Labour is claiming that The Right Way, the mini-book published by Kemi Badenoch this week setting out her political philosophy, shows that the Tories are not committed to the minimum wage.
In the book, Badenoch says:
Britain took the wrong way in the late 1990s when Labour governments came to believe that prosperity could be mandated by ministers. If wages were too low, ministers could mandate them higher and if investment was insufficient, they could direct savings.
The Tories have supported the minimum wage since it was introduced by Tony Blair’s government. But, commenting on Badenoch’s words, Bridget Phillipson, the Labour chair, said they showed that at heart the Tories do not support the idea.
It’s the same old Tories. They never learn. The Conservatives opposed the minimum wage when Labour introduced it, and they’re still opposed to it now.
Kemi Badenoch is the latest in a long line of failed Tory leaders who are determined to see workers made worse off. When so many people across Britain are struggling with the cost of living, it’s about as tin eared as you can get.
Kemi Badenoch needs to explain why she is so unhappy that workers were paid a minimum of £3.60 per hour – or does she think they should be paid less than that now?
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
