Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
There is a moment in a British supermarket that tells you more about the state of this country than anything you will hear from a politician in Westminster. A mother scans her shopping as she walks the aisles, watching the total climb on the handset. £40. £60. £80. She’s not even finished and already she’s working out what her family will have to go without. The decent cut of meat goes back. The children’s treats disappear from the trolley. She’s hunting for yellow stickers, calculating every pound, quietly returning things to the shelves that only a few years ago she would have bought without a second thought.
This isn’t someone who refuses to work or expects the state to provide everything. She’s done exactly what politicians have spent decades telling her to do. She works, pays her taxes, raises her children and tries to stand on her own two feet. Yet here she is, counting every pound in a supermarket while Conservatives debate how to protect million-pound inheritances.
She isn’t asking how to inherit a million pounds. She’s asking why a full week’s work no longer feels enough.
That is the Britain I wanted the Conservative Party to speak to at Conference. People who want to own a home, save a little money and give their children a better start than they had. These are hardly extravagant ambitions. They are the foundations of the property-owning democracy that Conservatives once championed. Yet I came away from Birmingham frustrated. Too much of what we offered seemed designed to reassure people who already vote Conservative. YouGov’s 11–12 October poll put us on 23 per cent, just one point behind Labour, with Reform on 21. Welcome progress, certainly but a conference bounce into the low twenties is not a governing coalition. We cannot rebuild a national party by having a conversation with ourselves.
And now, apparently, we have Waitrose Woman. According to the Mail on Sunday, Conservative strategists have identified this fictional voter as someone who could help return us to Downing Street. She’s aspirational, wants lower taxes, may previously have voted Labour or Liberal Democrat and is thoroughly fed up with being financially squeezed. Fine. I want her vote too. But if this really represents the pinnacle of our electoral thinking, somebody at CCHQ needs a serious rethink.
What about Lidl Mum? What about Aldi Dad? What about the single parent working every available hour and still struggling with the rent? Are these people somehow less aspirational because they don’t shop at Waitrose? The mother comparing prices in Lidl wants exactly what the mother shopping in Waitrose wants. A decent home, security for her children, some savings and the freedom to enjoy the rewards of her hard work. She may have less money but she certainly doesn’t have less ambition.
Kemi Badenoch’s The Right Way makes a serious case for enterprise, fiscal discipline, personal responsibility and a smaller, more effective state. It also acknowledges that our fourteen years in government were not an unqualified success. But explaining how Britain becomes wealthier is not the same as explaining how more Britons become wealthy. That is where our political offer falls short.
On page 17 of The Right Way, Kemi rightly condemns the effective 60 per cent income-tax rate facing somebody earning between £100,000 and £125,140. Add the usual 2 per cent employee National Insurance contribution and the combined marginal deduction reaches 62 per cent. It is an absurd system that discourages professionals from working additional hours or accepting promotion. Conservatives should want to fix it.
But here’s a statistic that should shame every Conservative. A worker receiving Universal Credit who pays basic-rate Income Tax and National Insurance and whose additional earnings face the full 55 per cent benefit taper, can keep just 32.4p of each additional pound earned. The remaining 67.6p disappears through tax, National Insurance and reduced benefits.
An additional-rate taxpayer in England, Wales or Northern Ireland ordinarily faces a combined marginal rate of 47 per cent. Someone trying to climb the first rungs of the ladder can therefore face a higher effective deduction than somebody earning hundreds of thousands.
Imagine a care assistant finishing a twelve-hour shift. Her manager asks whether she can cover additional hours at the weekend. Christmas is coming and the children need new coats. She agrees, rearranges childcare and gives up time with her family. She earns another £100 but under the tax and benefit deductions described above, her household is just £32.40 better off. Take away the cost of getting to work and arranging childcare and the reward for her effort shrinks further.
She did everything Conservatives tell people to do. The system took most of the reward anyway.
Arthur Laffer taught Conservatives that people respond to incentives. We invoke that principle when discussing entrepreneurs and high earners, quite rightly. But incentives matter just as much to somebody deciding whether an extra shift is worth sacrificing time with their family. If we believe in rewarding effort, that principle cannot suddenly become less important when somebody earns £25,000 rather than £125,000.
Hayek wrote that “liberty and responsibility are inseparable.” Yet we cannot preach self-reliance while making the rewards of self-reliance so miserably small. A system that penalises additional effort undermines the very independence Conservatives claim to champion.
On page 18, The Right Way says priority should generally go to taxes that do the most damage to work and investment. Quite right. But that principle cannot stop at the tax system and ignore the withdrawal of benefits. What matters to the person doing the extra shift is how much of the additional money they actually keep.
Now look at what we chose to celebrate at Conference. Andrew Griffith, our Shadow Chancellor, promised to abolish at least one tax in every Budget. Among his headline commitments was scrapping Labour’s mansion tax on homes worth more than £2 million. Then came a promise to abolish the packaging tax, which Griffith himself acknowledged most people had never heard of.
We are promising to abolish a tax we introduced. The Plastic Packaging Tax was brought in by a Conservative government in 2022, while the wider extended producer responsibility regime for packaging also has Conservative origins, although Labour subsequently implemented it. There are sound economic arguments against badly designed taxes and excessive regulation. But we had a national stage and an opportunity to explain how Conservatism would transform ordinary lives. Instead, much of the attention went to expensive homes and obscure business levies.
Griffith also restated our pledge to abolish stamp duty on main homes. Good. I support removing taxes that discourage ownership and mobility. But stamp duty is irrelevant to the young couple who cannot afford a deposit in the first place. If we want a property-owning democracy, we must first make ownership attainable.
Then came Kemi’s inheritance-tax announcement. Abolish inheritance tax on family homes, potentially allowing couples to pass on an additional £1 million tax-free. Under existing rules, married couples and civil partners can already potentially pass on up to £1 million free of inheritance tax when the relevant allowances apply. About one in twenty estates pays the levy. Yet protecting substantial inheritances became one of the defining economic messages of our Conference.
A policy can be popular in isolation without being the right priority for a party trying to rebuild its national appeal. When millions are struggling to accumulate their first £10,000 of savings, should one of our most prominent promises really concern protecting million-pound inheritances?
We spent years persuading voters in former Red Wall constituencies that Conservatism offered them a ladder. Now we risk looking as though we are more interested in protecting inheritances at the top than helping people climb from the bottom. Labour won’t need to invent the accusation that we’re the party of the wealthy. We’re providing the ammunition ourselves.
Why are we more excited about helping someone inherit a million pounds than helping a care worker keep more of her extra hundred?
So here is a challenge to Kemi and Andrew Griffith. Cut the Universal Credit taper from 55 per cent to 45 per cent. For a worker paying basic-rate Income Tax and National Insurance and subject to the full taper, that would increase the reward from an additional £100 of gross earnings from £32.40 to £39.60. It would not eliminate the problem but it would be a meaningful start. More importantly, it would demonstrate that our commitment to lower marginal deduction rates extends beyond professionals and entrepreneurs to people struggling to get ahead.
If fiscal constraints mean we cannot afford everything, the inheritance-tax pledge can wait.
This is not an argument for abandoning fiscal discipline. Reducing the taper would cost money, as would raising the personal allowance so working people keep more of their pay. Both require credible costings, phased implementation where necessary and difficult decisions about spending. Kemi’s Golden Economic Rule, directing at least half of identified savings towards deficit reduction, provides a framework. But political priorities are revealed by the choices we make within those constraints.
Nor should Conservatives ignore the other side of welfare reform. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that £9.9 billion in benefits was overpaid through fraud and error in 2025–26, including £5.42 billion attributed specifically to Universal Credit fraud. Pursue fraud relentlessly, tackle administrative failures, enforce obligations on those who can work but deliberately refuse to do so and stop treating taxpayers’ money as though it belongs to nobody. But welfare reform must also ensure that people already working are properly rewarded.
The Right Way calls for cheaper energy, more investment, fewer unnecessary regulations and greater fiscal responsibility. These are essential foundations for prosperity. But we need to connect them to something people can recognise in their own lives. A lower electricity bill. More money left after an extra shift. A realistic prospect of owning a home. The freedom to start a business without being suffocated by regulation and taxation.
Thatcher didn’t win the support of council tenants by lecturing them about protecting the wealth of people who already owned homes. She gave them the opportunity to own their own. Right to Buy turned an abstract argument about private ownership into a front door that belonged to you, keys you could call your own and something to leave your children.
Years later, Thatcher put the principle perfectly: “Capitalism should not be the prerogative of the few but the experience of the many.” That was the ambition: not simply to protect existing wealth but to give millions more the opportunity to build wealth of their own.
Where is our equivalent today?
Build more homes by confronting the planning restrictions that constrain supply. Give renters a genuine route into ownership. Reform the tax and benefit system so additional work brings a worthwhile reward. Make Britain a country where starting a business, employing people and creating wealth is celebrated rather than punished.
These are not concessions to the left. They are the practical application of Thatcherite principles to a country in which too many people work hard without accumulating anything. I want more millionaires, more successful businesses and more people enjoying the rewards of enterprise. But the Conservative Party should be at least as interested in creating tomorrow’s millionaires as protecting today’s inheritances.
Kemi has done something important. She has reminded the Conservative Party what it believes. Now she must demonstrate why those beliefs should matter to millions of people who have stopped listening. We need a national electoral coalition, not a carefully curated collection of demographic stereotypes. We need Waitrose Woman, certainly but we need Lidl Mum just as much.
We must become the party of the pay packet, not the inheritance.