By play-acting as if high immigration was an accident her party wandered into, Badenoch is guilty of admitting either her party’s deceit or incompetence. Neither of these implications is attractive to our exhausted electorate. British voters are desperate for concrete solutions to the problems that mass immigration has created.
Half of 15-year-olds say they spend more time in their bedroom than they would like to, three quarters want to spend more time doing activities outside their home, and two thirds say they would do more sport or physical activity if their school offered a wider choice.
Education reform alone will not reverse the surge in Neets. Government must reduce the cost of hiring young people, reform welfare and tackle the broken incentives in the labour market. “University at any cost” should be unmasked as the true villain, once and for all.
Currently we tax young people for getting an education that often doesn’t enhance their income, tax employers for hiring them, tax them for coupling up, ration the asset they most need to access adult life, and, when they fall into depression and despondence, reward them for giving up.
Conservatives have been eager to champion startups, small businesses, AI firms and tech entrepreneurs, but philanthropists who want to give back to their local communities are often welcome behind closed doors yet rarely backed at the national level.
The soaring number of exclusions in our schools reveals an education system that is in disarray. This highlights broader warning signs of an education system that has failed to get back on track even six years on from successive lockdowns.
Welfare should be a safety net, not a way of life. It should support people back into work, not write them off. We will vote against because, for all their self righteousness, Labour won’t see that ‘fairness’ cuts both ways.
It makes sense to fund degree apprenticeships in the same way as the rest of higher education rather than as a charge on employers via the Apprenticeship Levy which should be focussed on much more deserving cases
The employment rate was higher for mothers than either women or men without dependent children and has been since 2017. Working mothers still need better options to satisfy childcare requirements
Too often, the child poverty discussion purely focuses on income inequality. Policies like the two-child benefit cap focus on cash handouts that get families just over the relative income line needed to avoid being ‘in poverty’.
Either we can continue in the delusion that further borrowing and increased taxes will help us out of this mess, or we can be honest and call for real economic reform.
Labour believes the state spends our cash better than we can: the Tories must show how to let money fructify in the pockets of the people.
We are the only party that is prepared to tell the truth and take the tough decisions to get spending under control. That’s the way to bring real change.
In a speech at the Centre for Social Justice, Badenoch sets out how Britain is “sitting on a ticking time bomb” of welfare dependency and calls to restrict health benefits to only the “more serious conditions”.
For a country worried about child poverty, social mobility, loneliness, declining fertility and the cost of welfare, turning a blind eye to the marriage problem is no longer an option.