At last, my cynical streak is over. I can finally ditch the mopey frown and replace it with a beaming smile, for Kemi Badenoch has achieved what my therapist of six months was unable to. She has given me hope. Sorry, Karen, but an hour spent on ‘breathing exercises’ and talking about ‘how I feel’ simply won’t cut it.
This newfound spring in my step has been brought about by Badenoch’s announcement to restore tax-free shopping to non-EU overseas visitors. In her announcement, she said that Britain must be more competitive, and that we “should be the place where the world comes to shop.” The decision has been applauded by a number of business leaders, who argue that Britain has, for too long, been but a throwaway destination for tourists. That no one wants to spend their hard-earned dosh here, and would rather splurge it in Paris or Milan.
The relief would cost roughly £540m, and would be paid for by cracking down on “NHS health tourism” alongside cuts to the welfare budget. Opposition parties are in a tizzy. Reform have criticised Badenoch’s support for reintroducing the policy, Labour believe that chanting “u-turn” over and over will make the problem go away, and the Lib Dems have been too busy roleplaying as junior government ministers in Brighton to actually have a view on the matter. Or, in other words, the policy announcement has been a roaring success.
My optimism has not been shared across the right-of-centre spectrum, however, with Sherelle Jacobs writing in The Telegraph that the Tories are “running out of time.” She argues that tax cuts are meaningless if the party fails to manufacture policies which free up the days of hardworking Brits, and such a failure makes the Tories look like a “retro party from another age: inoffensive, at times sensible, but ultimately stale and, frankly, a bit strange.”
But whilst Jacobs touches only on policies that save Brits time, I think there is a bigger point to be made here. Namely, that policies should have some type of clear, tangible impact that can be enjoyed or felt rather than being obscured by meaningless jargon and statistics.
She uses childcare as one such example. Tinkering with childcare policy is one thing, sure, but unless those reforms make it easier for parents to organise their working lives around them, will they really have much of an impact? Will people actually notice? Or will they just hear yet another announcement that sounds good to a select few in Whitehall but in reality has very little impact on their daily lives? There is some merit to her argument.
Especially given the fact that our opponents vie for these types of policies almost constantly. In his first week as PM, our Andy announced that energy bills would be slashed and bus fares outside of London would be capped at £2.
There’s no convoluted explanation needed to understand these policies. One doesn’t need some acne-ridden, North-London-dwelling Treasury stooge to sit them down in front of some atrociously formatted spreadsheet and blabber on about marginal impacts and what not. You just experience it.
Now, call me naive, but I would suspect that most voters would sooner support a policy that, like in this instance, caps their bus fares, than one which promises that GDP will rise by however many percentage points over the next decade. Except for a handful of saddos in Westminster who obsess over the latter, people just want policies that make their day-to-day lives easier.
But, as is almost always the case, a balance must be struck. This is not to say that we should abandon long-term policies. A blind pursuit of short-termist, populist policies is one of the main reasons we are in the mess we find ourselves in at the moment. The real, structural issues that plague our country – whether that be our national debt, our ballooning welfare bill or our debt-to-GDP ratio – cannot be solved through easy, soundbite-fuelled slogans and fireworks. Sorry, Nigel.
And this is where I disagree with Jacobs. When I speak to voters who have yet to decide which party they will lend their support to, one of the things they admire about our party is that Kemi isn’t one to sugarcoat things. She doesn’t doll up the nation’s problems with some lipstick and a bow. And if we try to pursue such an agenda, we will find ourselves embroiled in the same issues that landed us on the opposition benches in the first place.
And Kemi’s announcement to reintroduce tax-free shopping perhaps best exemplifies this. It doesn’t line the electorate’s pockets with cash, nor does it massively impact their day to day life in the immediate term. But that’s not the point of the policy.
Taken alongside a wider series of tax cuts, it sends a message about the kind of country Britain wants to be. It tells would-be visitors that we are competitive, open for business and willing to attract investment rather than drive it elsewhere. There’s a lack of immediate benefit to this, I agree, but the impact that it will have long term is what matters for the country.
That is the balance that we as a government in waiting should be trying to strike. Give people policies they can actually feel, by all means, but don’t mistake immediacy for effectiveness. Much of government is spent not making flashy policy announcements, but laying down foundations such that the country will be a better place in 5 years time.
So no, we are not running out of time. I agree with the assessment that more should be done to give people some sense of immediate relief, but we shouldn’t become all consumed by it. In fact, in resisting the temptation to bend entirely towards immediacy, Kemi actually reaffirms the sensible public image that she has spent so long curating. We should not abandon long-term reform simply because it is harder to explain on the doorstep than a £2 bus fare.
The blind pursuit of immediacy and quick fix policies are – in part – why we faced an outright bashing at the ballot box in 2024. To respond to such a bashing with yet more short-termist gimmicks would be silly, and show that we have abandoned the future of the country for the sake of a few more votes.